I recently had the opportunity to interact with several senior CI practitioners from companies operating in various sectors such as IT, BFSI, Pharma, chemicals, etc. in India, at the briefing on competitive intelligence hosted by ValueNotes in Mumbai on 20^th August.

The enthusiastic response we received was the first indication to me, of the change in the significance of CI for companies in India. The interaction itself further confirmed my conjecture that the outlook for CI in India is most certainly changing. The high level of awareness of the attendees was reflected in the discussions that took place during the evening. The topics moved well beyond the fundamentals and benefits of CI, to issues relating to frameworks, CI tools, detailing of needs, measuring CI, ROI of CI, policies and ethics. There was a perceptible hunger for better intelligence inputs to improve corporate performance.

A key reason for this is that companies in India are facing more competition than they have ever faced before and going forward, this is likely to intensify further. As the developed economies falter, companies from around the world are turning to emerging markets. Companies in India increasingly have to fight to protect their turfs.

The multinationals in general are further up the curve than Indian companies, as far as their CI readiness is concerned. Going forward, competition will force Indian companies to seek the same strategic advantages that CI offers their challengers.

Competitive Intelligence as a discipline is relatively new in India, but I believe exciting times are just around the corner.

Creating awareness about CI and getting everyone to participate in it, is the first big hurdle companies face. Getting decision makers to articulate and detail their needs is the next one and biggest one, in my experience. Once you get past that, you need to figure out what analysis you need in order to address the need. This in turn will tell you what information points to collect. The devil is in the details – so the more granular your plan, the more efficient and effective your CI will be.

Only after you have got past all of that will you come to the actual data collection and this is the step where most tools will help you. They will pull in, filter, organise, classify, retrieve and disseminate information from various sources in various ways in an automated fashion. Some tools will also help you spot trends, patterns and relationships in your business environment. But for the tools to work well, you need to be asking them the right questions to start with.

If not, “Garbage in garbage out” most aptly describes what you might end up with. Your CI initiative will take a long time to recover from the damage to its reputation.

In emerging economies like India, there is another reason companies need to tread with caution around CI tools. The key methodology for CI in these markets is actually primary research – information gained from person to person interactions and informal networks. Besides, as the level of Internet penetration is lower, you have only a limited amount of fodder for automated tools to play around with. So you may not really need tools that help with searching and filtering. You may only need efficient ways to capture, store and retrieve fragmented intelligence residing with a large number of people – both internal and external.

Bottomline: Look for a tool only after you know what purpose you want it to serve!

Among other things, customers are extremely vocal about their likes, dislikes, needs, wants and desires on social platforms. And often, competitors are also equally loud in discussing upcoming products / services, customer support for known issues, apart from company promotion. It then makes business sense to track the opinions of all these stakeholders. These online communications could contribute greatly towards meeting the myriad strategic objectives of collecting competitive intelligence.

Is the competitive intelligence community leveraging this seemingly infinite resource pool? How many CI professionals are actually harnessing the power of social media, as a part of their CI framework? How are they doing so, and what benefits are they experiencing? For the benefit of the competitive intelligence community at large, we intend to find out…

We would really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to fill out this online survey on the use of social media for competitive intelligence here.

All respondents will receive a summary of the key survey findings.  Look forward to your valuable inputs!

What does this have to do with competitive intelligence?

The success of the competitive intelligence system in a company depends crucially on the participation of its employees, as most times, some of the best sources of CI actually reside within the company. Further, competitive intelligence is required by virtually all functions in an organisation. But like street lighting, while everyone would like to use competitive intelligence, very few people are willing to commit to contributing to it.

Why else do strategy and planning teams have so much difficulty in getting in getting inputs and MISs from those in sales and operations?  Knowledge sharing initiatives often start with a lot of enthusiasm and then die down after a while. Organisations find themselves constantly balancing the carrot and the stick to get information and insights.

The CEO can play a very critical role in ensuring that CI gets the priority it deserves – similar to the government’s role in keeping the streets lit. Naturally, he cannot be expected to do anything hands-on; but if he is seen to be seriously committed to the CI process within the company, the employees will take it seriously too.

An obvious and direct way is for him to ask to see the intelligence on the basis of which decisions are taken within his company.  He can also send other, more subtle messages to his organisation through his communications. Talking about it informally in social gatherings, asking his senior managers incisive questions on the business environment, bringing it up in a blog on the intranet, mentioning it in a speech to the employees, etc. are some of the ways in which the CEO can usher in a CI culture within the organisation.

What are the other things CEOs do to strengthen CI processes in their company?

As a competitive intelligence professional in an emerging economy, documentation is my pet peeve. Business and economic growth in developing economies will be higher with greater transparency and information, all other things remaining unchanged.

The argument is simple. Under-documentation is a big impediment to decision making. It makes informed decision making very expensive. This means that there is less efficiency in the system as a whole.

Market research professionals and competitive intelligence practitioners in India have long cried hoarse about the need for improving the (government) statistical machinery. For without it, we are all shooting in the dark.

I recently came across another interesting angle on documentation in developing economies!

Hernando de Soto, well known Peruvian economist and guru of trickle up capitalism, argues for yet another reason for improving documentation in the developing countries. He argues that increased documentation of activities (including identities of people) brings them into the legal system. They are then able to participate in the “neighbourhood economies” and this is a way out of poverty for them. This is how the “trickle up” happens.

A slum dweller without an address and identity proof finds it much harder to get employment than one who has it. If he owns a hut with a clear title, it has some value; he has some wealth. Without the title, he owns the hut because his neighbours know he lives there; he cannot monetise it.

His prescription is to start the documentation from the very bottom of the pyramid.

Nandan Nilekani’s initiative – the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI) for giving a unique ID (UID) to each citizen; does not have Soto’s rationale for documenting identities as part of its vision or mission; but will serve the same purpose.

The next step for the government is to integrate the UID with the remaining statistical machinery so as to have consistent information and databases. Put these developments together with the recent Right to Information Act – and I think I am beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel – albeit a very small one.