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.

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.

In the real world, it is impossible to have perfect information on the competitive environment, although that is what everyone would ideally like to have.

In order to stay ahead of the game, senior managers are required to take fast decisions. They do the best they can based on whatever inputs they have available to them at the time. They augment the CI available to them with their own intuition and gut feel. In fact, it would not be entirely wrong to say that very often decision makers actually start with some intuitive hunches they have and then use CI inputs to ratify their hunch.

Nothing wrong with that, I feel. Intuition is a very powerful phenomenon that comes out of subconscious activity in our brain. Our brain, it is said, is the most powerful computer. It stashes away and analyses information and experiences that we don’t even recognise we have.

But how reliable is intuition? It works very well in some cases, but is not always on spot. The brain will only process whatever is inputted in it. If there aren’t enough relevant inputs, the analysis cannot be reliable. If one has had a lot of prior experience with similar decisions in the past, the gut feel is likely to be more reliable; so even a small amount of hard data to support the decision may be enough for the decision maker. On the other hand, if there is little prior experience, it is probably better to do thorough research before taking the leap.

So how does one hit the right balance between hard evidence and intuition in each case?  I found some pointers in a recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly – “How to test your decision-making instincts” very pertinent.

Essentially the article lays down four tests to judge the reliability of your intuition in a situation.

• The familiarity test – whether you have been in a similar situation before
• The feedback test – whether you were able to see the result of your actions in the similar situation before
• The measured emotions test – whether your emotional reactions in the earlier situation were strong or weak
• The independence test – whether you have any other (personal) interest in the decision to be taken

What does this mean for CI practitioners? They are often not the decision makers, and are not privy to the “educated” intuition of the seasoned decision maker. They still need to provide actionable intelligence based on imperfect information. And this is the key challenge for them!

This is not a new idea. CI literature everywhere stresses the fact that the right answers come from asking the right questions.

“CI, in a nutshell, is the art of asking the right questions to the right sources in the right way at the right time.”

Nevertheless, even CI practitioners sometimes forget to do this. So it is important to remind ourselves of it.

Senior management asks to monitor the competition. And what do we do? Jump into the task and create profiles of competitors. All the key fields are covered. The profiles are well formatted and delivered ahead of time. Unfortunately, management is not satisfied – the unappreciative, grumpy lot!

The reason of course, is that we didn’t bother to ask them why they want to monitor competition. Do they want to fine tune their pricing? Do they want to improve product design or service offering? Do they want to benchmark the salaries they offer? …you get the point. So our profile covers all generic fields about the company and information comes from easily accessible sources such as the company website and publicly available reports.

Sure, at some level, every company wants to do everything better than the competition. However, all companies have specific priorities and pain points at any given time. If you give them competitor intelligence that will help them with strategic decision making, they will keep coming back to you.

So the first step is to initiate dialogue with the users of the intelligence to find out the “right” questions that need to be answered – the “20 questions” that will nail down the needs of the decision makers.

* For those who haven’t, here it is in a nutshell: “In the traditional game, one player is chosen to be the answerer. That person chooses a subject but does not reveal this to the others. All other players are questioners. They each take turns asking a question which can be answered with a simple “Yes” or “No” – only 20 questions in all. If a questioner guesses the correct answer, that questioner wins and becomes the answerer for the next round.”