Excuse you. CI digitalization primer.

You can excuse yourself for being increasingly overwhelmed by the amount and speed of available data and information and by the challenge to derive meaningful and actionable insights from it.

But your excuse to be able to manually manage it all indefinitely falls short of a self critical view upon your and your organization’s resources and capabilities.

Define ‘sensitive’.

In our increasingly digitalized world pretty much every set of data and information is threatened the exact same way.

Why? Because everything is connected.

Where does your ‘sensitive’ data and information sit today?

In the brains of a chosen few?

What does it do there?

It certainly doesn’t unfold its potential through collective wisdom and decision making.

Or does your ‘sensitive’ data and analysis swirl around in the wires and clouds of your email servers and legacy systems?

When you feel comfortable with that because you might have a strong security policy in place, why not cloning the same policy across all systems? Including a digitalized market and competitive intelligence system?

You can actually add additional layers of security that go beyond many other system’s capabilities. User rights management, content validation and simply preventing certain data to be added go a long way.

Proven concept

The big players in the competitive intelligence software industry have mastered those ‘sensitivity’ concerns for two decades now and scores of their clients have enjoyed the most stringent security and privacy regime.

Why?

Because it is in the core of their business mission and failing on that promise with their clients would mean to lose their right for existence altogether.

At this point I am quite sure that your second excuse won’t prevail either.

Now here’s a valid reason not to modernize your toolbox: saving money. 

I hate to burst your bubble but did you do the math on those scenarios of late:

• A competitor is faster to market with a new product range that eats into your customer base and long term profits

• Regulators pull the plug on a financial or innovation legislation your company benefits from

• Key opinion leaders push a scientific study that scrutinizes and bad-mouths a key ingredient you deliver into the global market

• A key competitor in distress swaps their management team with a ‘clean-up’ brigade but you miss that signal and another competitor acquires a filet-piece technology that will give them an edge

• Competing or missing data lead to mediocre decisions or a total lack of responsiveness to competitive threats

The books are packed with examples of missed opportunities and failures to mitigate risks pro-actively that run into the millions or more.

So, in the wake of some such events the only excuse you are left to tell your board is that YOU DIDN’T SEE IT COMING?!

From my practice and observation, there are scores of additional benefits when digitalizing your market and competitive intelligence that I don’t want to leave unmentioned:

Implementing a digitalized competitive intelligence and market monitoring software has a healing systemic effect as it forces the entire organization to establish a common language, slick processes and a mutual understanding about the decision processes.

A culture change comes as a bonus as all future users will acquire a shared ‘lay of the land’ understanding of there (often complex) competitive landscape. 

With it also comes a common terminology and think about how all of the abovesupports your new recruit’s bombarding process.

There might be many good reasons to hold off an investment of a modernized and ‘live’ competitive intelligence process and system.

But there are also some that turn out to be costly excuses in the long run.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch if we can support your project in any way: Advising, planning, coaching project teams, pitching to your management, selecting vendors and their solutions, even running the entire project for you.