The Language of CI
We all speak different versions of ‘the language of CI,’ depending on our background and our current job emphasis. Over the years, one individual has made an attempt to put a stake in the ground around the definitions for words and terms commonly used in CI — Vernon Prior has been updating his “Language of CI” vocabularly for the last 20 years, ever since he started writing a column for the Competitive Intelligence Review.
Vernon’s CI dictionary has now expanded to over 50 pages of content, and he updates his magnum opus annually. We have been posting his work on the SCIP website for the last 8 years, and I have the pleasure of adding his latest version. You can view the PDF at www.scip.org by selecting the “Resources” tab at the left , then selecting “Language of CI.” Or you can view the PDF directly here. Vernon’s work is open to all.
Business lessons from The Office: Season 5 Episode 12
A popular TV program has an episode covering competitive intelligence gathering. Ron Desi, a business professor at the University of Baltimore Towson, added a recent post to his blog concerning the topic of an episode of ”The Office”. (You can find the full post here.)
“Dunder Mifflin corporate asked Michael to gather some information on a competitor in a potential new market. Michael and Dwight decide to go “undercover” and obtain competitive intelligence. Michael pretended to be a potential client while Dwight pretended to be an interested potential employee.”
According to the Ethics Code of SCIP, misrepresenting yourself is a severe ethical violation. Deception should never be used to obtain competitive information — it is not an acceptable business practice. In many corporations obtaining such information under these circumstances would also be a violation of the corporate code of conduct.
Another key question to ask is what would corporate decision makers do with this information when they receive it? The assumption is that they would be able to ’steal’ the competitor’s customers, but that would only occur if the company could match or exceed the buying requirements of the competitor’s customers, whether it is price, service, product choice, whatever.
If you’d like to see a more comprehensive review of competitive intelligence ethics, look into the Competitive Intelligence Foundation’s book, conveniently named “Competitive Intelligence Ethics.”
SCIP Webinar Archive: another opportunity to learn.
Today I spoke a SCIP webinar on “Searching through CI eyes.” In some respects I found the experience of preparing and presenting it to be a cross between speaking to a group and writing a column – I had to script out what I covered, pace the presentation to the time available, and cover more information than the PowerPoints contained. (My dog heard a lot about CI, too.)
Over the last year SCIP has held webinars twice a month on a wide variety of topics, from “Building Awareness of the CI Function,” to “Benchmarking for Insight.” Many of you have participated in the live webinars, and your evaluations have told us that they delivered focused and usable information and insight.
For those of you who were not able to join the original webinars, you can still access their content through the SCIP webinar archive. A $75 payment provides you access to the archived audio and PowerPoints of 12 (and counting) recent webinars. Available topics are:
Using social networking to enhance CI programs
Building awareness of the CI function
Selling CI ideas to the Senior Executive Officer
CI in legal and professional services
The KIT user-needs identification process
Seven highly effective steps to establishing a CTI program
Applying CI to build sales force effectiveness
Increasing your intelligence ROI
Benchmarking for insight on R&D productivity
When war games don’t work and how to fix them
Collecting human intelligence.
If you’d like further information about the webinar archive, or want to suggest a webinar topic. or are interested in giving a webinar, please contact Sandy Skipper at sskipper@scip.org
An interview with the SCIP09 keynote speaker, Michael Treacy.
In the November/December 2008 issue of Competitive Intelligence Magazine Derek Johnson (the SCIP09 conference chair) published his interview with the conference keynote speaker, Michael Treacy. Here are several excepts from this interview.
This year SCIP09 is in Chicago, IL, on April 21-24.
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Derek Johnson, Aurora WDC
After spending two hours with Michael Treacy, I’m convinced that we have a stunning speaker on our hands for SCIP09. Treacy’s background and areas of expertise complement the core ideologies that many competitive intelligence practitioners support through the daily challenges our organizations encounter.
What would the SCIP membership find interesting about you?
I’ve had three careers: I’ve been an academic for 10 years, I was a consultant for 10 years, and since 1999 I’ve been an entrepreneur. I start one new business a year. The real heart and soul of my effort is around new ventures. I’ve added a new venture to my portfolio each year since 1999, and they’ve all been very successful. And that’s what gives me the practical side of what I’ve got, because I actually have to do this.
When I was consulting, every plan was perfect; the client just messed up the execution. The biggest thing I have learned creating businesses is that no plan is perfect. In fact, if your plan is 80 percent correct, you’re lucky.
How can smaller niche players achieve double-digit growth when they face intense competition from behemoth competitors?
It’s rare when markets are relatively homogenous in the value demands their customers have. Most of the time markets are fairly heterogeneous and those segments are large. Some idiosyncratic people within that business are still looking for a different kind of value that you can find.
Here’s an example of this. Two miles down the road is a thriving hardware store called Harvey’s Hardware. You’d think that in a world of Home Depot and Lowe’s, this guy would be overrun. Absolutely the opposite! He understands the business he’s in—providing advice and being hassle-free. He really understands the people out there who don’t want to do it themselves, and who just want to write a check and have it taken care of. So he built a value proposition around just advice and hassle-free service. This is not operational excellence in the price sense; it’s operational excellence in that it’s truly hassle-free. You walk in there, you tell him your problem, he’ll bring the products to the counter for you. It’s not for everybody, it’s expensive. But thriving!
How important is it to extend your thinking from “competitive” intelligence to also pay attention to such areas as customer, market, and product level intelligence?
I interpret your question as, “What are the areas in which competitive intelligence can have the most immediate impact?” The first one is M&A activity, because acquisitions are the game changers in industries—particularly big acquisitions. I’ve seen companies dramatically regret not having been prepared to compete for some asset when it came available, because they didn’t ever think it’d come available.
Since customer value is so foundational, the second area of impact is generating deep insight into what’s happening with customers. Market research is an abject failure at doing this, as its approach applies too much of a predictably structured and defined analysis. They are infinitely knowledgeable about topics that really don’t seem to matter very much, and they really miss out on the fundamentally important understanding of the value the client really needs and how it is changing.
The other part is simply what I call value-shifts: What are the shifts taking place in people’s demand for value? Determining this requires a more open triangulation approach to research that competitive intelligence could be really good at.
Competitive intelligence is figuring out the needle in the haystack that has priority: What is it that if I knew, I could quickly translate into action? And then, how do I go figure it out? The vacuum cleaner approach of sucking up data can be a big waste of time. But I do think competitive intelligence is probably the third most valuable area of investment for businesses, behind M&A activity and behind a really deep understanding of the customer.
What other CI-related general insights can you give us?
You know what big questions your firm faces, where you have some leverage. What are the really big things that, even if you’re not asked to do it, you do anyway and come up with some insight people recognize as valuable? So to me, that’s first and foremost.
Business is going to have to create a management system that responds and reacts to a much more dynamic world. And we’ve seen those systems in the investment world where portfolio management is a system for dealing with uncertainty. In the venture capital world, it’s about progressive investment, where they drip money into their ventures and have to deal with this profound uncertainty about whether this entrepreneur is ever going to succeed. Competitive intelligence needs to really think carefully, “How do I fit in to that new world?”
Michael Treacy
Michael Treacy is an internationally known expert on corporate strategy and business process transformation. He is pioneering a whole new approach to customer, industry, and competitive analysis. Michael Treacy has had a distinguished career aiding senior management of major corporations around the world, transforming their businesses. His books, The Discipline of Market Leaders and Double-Digit Growth, are business bestsellers, and his third book is scheduled for release in May 2009. Mr. Treacy received a BS from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management where he was a professor.
Starting a Competitive Intelligence Function
The January/February 2009 issue of Competitive Intelligence Magazine focuses on the issues surrounding the start of a new competitive intelligence function. Here’s my Editor’s Letter for that issue.
Frequently an organization’s primary motivation for starting a competitive intelligence function is when they experience a negative outcome from a competitive action or change that management did not anticipate. Looking back they can determine that signals foreshadowing this event existed. Often they had access to information and knowledge about the likelihood of this change before it occurred. Now, they want to prevent those types of surprises in the future when possible, or mitigate their effect if they are unavoidable. (Some have even referred to the CI function as the ‘department of surprise avoidance.”)
Once the decision has been made to create a CI capability, a wealth of advice and knowledge concerning the steps necessary to define, develop, implement, and use an intelligence function exists in many sources. (Much of this knowledge is captured in the 35 chapters of the CI Foundation book Starting a Competitive Intelligence Function.) The problem arises when those creating the CI capability sit down to determine the relative importance of each element and setting a priority on developing them.
Commonly, when a new CI person asks about the issues surrounding the start of a CI function, their questions are:
1) Where should it be placed in the organization.
2) How many people should it have.
3) What software should I use.
While they are valid and vital questions, three other topics have a much more direct impact on the ultimate success or failure of the CI effort. Interestingly, all three almost identical elements appear in the discussion of what makes a new CI function fail (Sawka) and how CI succeeds in the future (Fahey). Two of the three measures center on decision-maker involvement.
1) Surfacing or creating decision-makers’ needs, rather than responding to what they say they need. Managers must directly work with the CI team to link those questions to decisions, strategies, plans, and actions they are considering or pursuing. Then, the function delivers answers to the right set of questions.
2) The critical intelligence output is insight developed through analysis and based on judgments, conclusions, forecasts and implications. It informs them about business issues and challenges not previously visible or provides a different perspective on recognized needs. This insight engages the decision-makers and differentiates them from other information providers in the organization.
3) Intelligence is co-created by the interaction of CI staff and decision makers. They discuss and debate the intelligence findings, include CI staff in strategy development, and provide feedback on their satisfaction with the intelligence they receive. A critical measure of CI value is the output to use ratio: the percentage of their outputs that decisions makers put to use for some purpose.
To quote from Fahey’s article, “Seasoned intelligence professionals know that their value contribution does not come from the provision of outputs (no matter the quality of the insights delivered), but rather through dialogue with their decision-makers. It is this back-and-forth dialogue that enables managers to “live in” the context of insights and think for themselves how the world might be different and what it all might mean for decision-making and action.”
academia.edu
Richard Price of Oxford recently created a website, Academia.edu, which does two things:
- It shows academics around the world structured in a ‘tree’ format, displayed according to their departmental and institutional affiliations.
- It enables academics to see news on the latest research in their area - the latest people, papers and talks.
From the site: “We are hoping that Academia.edu will eventually list every academic in the world — Faculty Members, Post-Docs, Graduate Students, and Independent Researchers. Academics can add their departments, and themselves, to the tree by clicking on the boxes. More than 24,000 academics have added themselves in the last four months.”
Academia.edu has several potential uses in competitive intelligence. Primarily it allows you to search by ‘research interests.’ The results show a ‘tree’ of individuals who have self-selected that topic as a key research interest.
When you click on a person, it shows you their profile, which includes their email address, web homepage, and telephone number. This provides you a way to identify and contact academics (including graduate students) who work in these areas. Individuals can also add copies of their papers (currently at 86,900) to their profiles. Additional capabilities are available when you sign up for your own entry.
A casual scan through the universities shows a high percentage of non-U.S. institutions. Although 24,500 profiles sounds high, the site has additional growing to do before it becomes a regular tool to identify experts or researchers in a particular study area. For instance, a search for ‘competitive intelligence’ only returned two profiles, one from Rutgers and the other from Sakarya University. The site also might consider placing a limit on how many research interests one person can list.
Interview with Mark Asher, CI Manager Adobe, part 2
The SCIP Oregon chapter chairs, Sean Campbell and Scott Swigart of Cascade Insights, have been conducting a series of interviews with CI practitioners. The full interview is on their sciporegon.com, but its worth reposting segments (with permission) on the SCIP site. This the second part of the interview.
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Sean: How do you present it as positive when someone is doing their standard direct marketing, increasing share and perception, and you need to step up and tell them that they’re missing something important and possibly dangerous?
Mark: You always have to talk about competitive threats in terms of the opportunity they present. For example, if there is the potential for a bigger competitor to come out with a cheaper substitute for one of our products, would there be case for us to re-think our pricing strategy?
Or, in light of this development, should we consider packaging multiple products together at the same price, or reposition ourselves as more technologically advanced, for example? We could certainly sound the alarm and create a panic, or ignore the development and assume our current strategy is optimal. Neither of these approaches is appropriate, because the former lacks substance and the latter doesn’t acknowledge that the environment has changed.
I’m here to influence others. I don’t make or sell products right now, and my currency is how well I can influence others to change the direction of product roadmaps, marketing programs, and other tactics, in order to adjust to the competitive environment.
The best way to do that is to be optimistic, provide a fact-based analysis and case for change, and let stakeholders know how they can be successful in spite of the competitive threat.
An important part of my being able to cut through a lot of the barriers that people might otherwise raise is that fact that I have been in the trenches as a product manager. People find it reassuring that I’ve done their job and that I’m familiar with the day-to-day challenges they face, and they know I am not just some new-hire MBA without real experience, trying to tell them how to do their job.
Scott: If people in a product group have a certain amount of denial about a threat or are fairly dismissive of it, are there certain techniques that you use to help them objectively look at the threat and understand your perspective?
Mark: It varies depending on individual personalities. Some people need a very direct conversation about the fact that there is a serious threat to their business, and others would totally close you out if you approached them that way, instead responding better to a softer and more positive approach.
In general, though, everyone reacts well to fact-based analysis. If you come to people and say that you have read a few blog posts and decided that there is a threat that will undermine their business objectives in the next 12 months, they are likely to say that’s not good enough.
On the other hand, if you can tell them the history of the pieces that you are putting together, how the situation has changed, and show them for example that a competitor has hired people and invested a bunch of money into something, you can build a more compelling case for them.
That kind of approach breaks through a lot of the emotional part of denial. It works better and faster in some cases than others, but I would liken it to a lawyer arguing in front a judge, making sure they have a fact-based case. There’s a lot of misdirection and unsubstantiated information out there that is often used to justify direction, but you can’t build a sturdy case that way.
Scott: You’re also alluding there to the fact that a competitor can’t do something really major without leaving some sort of a trail. Evidence shows up somewhere, whether it’s session abstracts, job postings, blogs, or wherever. And when you lay that paper trail out in front of somebody, it’s more than just a hunch.
One of our colleagues who does a lot of war gaming likes to point out the value of asking somebody what they think the competitor will do. That effectively eliminates a lot of weak assumptions about how smart and effective the competitor might be. Sometimes, weaknesses in your own position become very obvious at that point.
Mark: A basic technique we use in scenario planning is to switch roles and pretend to be a competitor, saying, “How are we going to compete against Adobe?”
Sean: What are some of the tools of the trade that you use? Are there particular sites you use to extract information about the industry? Do you have particular sources of secondary information you’ve found of value?
Mark: Sure. First of all, I thank goodness every day that we have the Internet, because doing this role 10 or 20 years ago must have been a whole different ball of wax. There’s a lot of public record information available, and over time I’ve assembled an RSS feed that must include 90-plus blogs now, that I’ve identified as credible and timely that I can extract information about our competitors from.
I run through that several times a day, and it spans the gamut of individual bloggers like business development folks blogging on behalf of the company, as well as third parties from all sorts of trade magazines and similar publications that provide information. Obviously, you take everything with the appropriate grain of salt.
I certainly look at analyst reports on a regular basis, including post-earnings releases, as well as in between earnings releases when they might do a sector analysis or a channel analysis or some other broader piece that involves the competitors that I monitor. Those tend to be good sources of information, too.
I’m a regular attendee at competitive trade shows and conferences, and the good news is that nobody’s kicked me out yet, even though in a lot of cases they know who I am, now.
Sean: We know what a chilling impact it has for us to walk up to a booth and tell people we’re doing competitive intelligence. We usually follow that up with, “Well, you weren’t going to tell me anything under NDA anyway, so whatever you were telling the last five people, why don’t you just tell me that?”
Normally that gets a laugh, and the funny thing is they end up saying a lot, then.
Scott: It’s almost like they want to prove you wrong, like, “Oh, no. I’m not afraid of you.”
Mark: I agree. Still, it’s sometimes amazing what people are willing to talk about. Ethically, though, acting on proprietary information that might be disclosed even in an informal conversation is out-of-bounds as far as I’m concerned, and I will not use it in developing CI deliverables.
Sean: What do you think the balance is between primary intel and secondary intel? I have heard it said that CI is one part analytical and one part intuitive. Even if I am willing to sit and research something for three hours, I also need to know when to pull up, pick up the phone, and call somebody.
Where is the line from your perspective regarding where to use a primary intelligence method versus a secondary research effort?
Mark: Generally, for things like high-level strategic direction, a combination of primary resources are probably best. In this case, I ‘m defining “primary” as sitting through the entire eight-hour analyst day for a competitor, which they tend to webcast these days.
If I just read a transcript or somebody else’s assessment of that day, they’re not going to be thinking from the same frame of reference as me. It’s really important for me to be able to experience it myself, so that the questions that I have are getting answered by listening through the presentation.
I might still benchmark that again, using secondary research and the perspectives added by various analysts, but I think experiencing that type of content directly is vital.
For things like comparative product analysis or other really detailed stuff, a secondary resource is a good start, and then I tend to benchmark with our own folks here, just to make sure that I’m not missing something at the detail level.
We do a number of deep dives each year on specific companies, and we’ve established a body of that content over time. As we’ve matured we have concentrated on fine-tuning that knowledge base.
We’ll look at the body of content that’s been developed over a six month period for a competitor and adjust our deep dive perspective and implications based on that.
In addition to public record resources, I have also developed a broad network of people at different companies over time that I can reach out to for clarification and general direction. Obviously, I would never violate any ethical standard or go down any path that could violate proprietary interests, but clarification is important.
I mentioned that I read a lot of blogs from folks that publish for trade publications, and so on. I have established working relationships with some of those folks, and it’s great to have them to bounce ideas off of, because they obviously follow these companies very closely and often have additional insight.
Scott: You mentioned a few things that roll up under your role of competitive intelligence at a strategic level, such as contingency planning, war gaming, and data collection like reading through blogs, sitting through webcasts, and going to trade shows.
Do you have other tips and tricks for the CI professional? Everybody kind of starts at Google, but more often than not, a lot of very important data comes from starting points other than that. What advice can you offer to another CI professional about places that can be a goldmine in terms of the quality and quantity of data?
Mark: First of all, don’t dismiss Google, because even though I have found some more advanced techniques, document searches are important.
Using the “search by filetype” option of Google’s Advanced Search often yields a lot of sales materials. There are often details in these documents that you wouldn’t normally find in a straightforward Google search, such as pricing or timelines.
The right combination of keywords is also a powerful tool. Typing in a competitor’s name usually gives you this ridiculous firehose of stuff, but mentioning a particular executive’s name or a combination of a technology and a product might give you far more targeted results.
Learning how to use the right keywords along with specific filetypes is a really powerful way to get insights about competitive activity.
Blog searches and automated alerts (which can be set up to target specific keywords and push new developments directly to email) are other tools which have proved useful.
Scott: Date ranges are sometimes useful as well.
Mark: Right. And beyond all of that, I subscribe to Thomson ONE for analyst reports. As I mentioned before, analyst reports are a great source of information, especially what you can learn from long-term trends around key financial information, like OpEx or R&D spending over time. It takes a little bit of effort and an affinity for financials, but there is a lot to be learned.
Any CI practice should have someone with the skills to analyze long-term trends in financial information. I also have access to most of the products that compete with what we’re interested in and try to understand them as best I can.
That’s a big effort, and obviously, I can’t do it all, but I think it’s an important element to being credible about talking about a competing solution. I also sign up for a lot of pre-beta, pre-alpha, and closed-beta experiences with new products and services.
Even though I am fully disclosed about who I am and what I do, I often end up being invited to these private betas, which is great because that means we get exposure to things that haven’t hit the commercial market yet and we can respond in a much more timely way as a result.
Sean: Using virtualization, you can set up on your average garden variety laptop, essentially as many competing products as you want. That lets you fairly quickly clear some of the fog around a beta or an alpha release, in terms of claims about scalability, enterprise capability, or whatever the claims are in a particular industry segment.
I think the other thing that people miss is the ability to tap their own resources internally; product managers work with customers who are buying competing products all the time. Listening to them comment about competing products can be a very valuable resource.
Scott: Organizations that have a centralized CI practice sometimes tend to use that practice as a sort of magic encyclopedia where they can feed in questions or needs and get answers out. That makes the CI practitioners feel a little bit like wizards and the other people in the company don’t really know how CI works.
The danger there is that people in the organization may not realize how they might be leaking information, because they don’t really know industry CI practices. If they don’t really know the tactics and techniques that a CI professional in a competing company would be using, they could potentially leak information without realizing it.
How much is it the responsibility of the CI practice to educate the organization at large? For example, to tell them that while they may want to put good descriptive information in a job posting, that there may a downside to that as well?
Mark: In Adobe’s case, we have a Corporate Communications group who is responsible for managing our public-facing engagements. They provide training to speakers about where the appropriate boundaries are for disclosure for all kinds of public events, conferences, press and analyst meetings, and so on.
Sean: In the name of transparency, lots of companies feel pressed to fully disclose their road maps, bug databases, and the rest of it. Of course, that can be a great aid to your competitors.
Have you ever been in those types of conversations where the community or an evangelist who urges you to be open as a means of moving above and beyond your competitors, and how do you deal with that?
Mark: I think every company has to assess this separately and make their own choices about the level of disclosure that is appropriate. In high tech there is some benefit to being open about one’s business direction … customers can plan upgrade cycles more efficiently, analysts can model financial expectations more accurately, and developers can evaluate platform choices more effectively, for instance. Of course, as you said, competitors are watching too, and this must be taken into account.
It’s also true that, in spite of the fact that there are companies that don’t provide road maps and that say very little about what their product development cycle is, somebody out there has often already figured it out. If you can’t get it directly from the company, there is often somebody who’s modeled it, thought about it, and forecast it.
Especially in high tech, there is a huge industry of just watching the industry itself.
Sean: We’re drawing near the end of our time, so is there anything you want to return to or that we have missed?
Mark: I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on something. I told you that our approach is more strategic than tactical. Do you find that a lot of SCIP folks are being positioned as more strategic, or is the majority still working at the more tactical level of, say, market research or product comparisons?
Sean: I think there is a little battle going, and there is a general trend upward, with people trying either to attach themselves to the CMO way high up and essentially give guidance downward or building out organizations that have equal weight with the existing ones.
We’ve also talked to a fair number of people that tell us they are more or less asked to be the librarians for CI. My own two cents is that I think there are a lot of people interested in building the overall legitimacy of CI as a discipline that is, for instance, taught in college programs.
Of course, there are a lot of factors that don’t lend themselves to being taught in a college setting, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. That just means that there is a life-skill component as well. Overall, I think there is a bit of a tendency to over-classify it, in terms of how CI should fit into the larger organization, and I think it’s important not to let that eclipse the need for an overall strategy.
Interview with Mark Asher, CI manager Adobe part 1
The SCIP Oregon chapter chairs, Sean Campbell and Scott Swigart of Cascade Insights, have been conducting a series of interviews with CI practitioners. The full interview is on their sciporegon.com blog, but its worth reposting segments (with permission) on the SCIP site.
Bonnie
Sean Campbell: Mark, tell us about yourself, your role at Adobe, and your experience with CI.
Mark: Sure; I have been at Adobe just under eight years, and I have held a number of different roles in product management, business operations, and now in competitive intelligence through the corporate development organization for about two years.
Our competitive intelligence practice has two main charters. The first of those is primarily to keep our management team aware of competitive developments across all of Adobe’s business thrusts and interests, as well as providing them with thoughtful implications and recommendations about how to react to those events as they occur.
In this context, events can be anything from earnings or product releases to acquisitions or major management shifts–pretty much any activity that impacts our interests. Most of that is backward looking, as you might expect. Something happens, and we provide thoughtful insight about it.
The other part of our charter is to provide forward-looking information about competitive events that haven’t occurred yet, in terms of predicting what those might be and the probability that they will occur. We work with the various senior leaders across the company to try to understand how the potential for those events might impact their planning about where they are taking their businesses.
That interaction can be very structured and take the form of scenario planning or gaming. At other times, it will be very unstructured, but in either case, the ultimate goal is to come up with playbooks of tactics that we can put in place ahead of these events occurring so that we can just pull triggers in order to effectively blunt or reflect the impact of those events.
Sean: So to take an easy example, you may see software as a service coming up and decide to offer Photoshop as a service, to get ahead of the curve.
Mark: Right, although I would say it’s probably less broad than that. More specifically, Competitor X has the potential to release an Application Y, and what would that look like? Or the potential to acquire Company B. What would the landscape look like if that were to occur and how should we react?
Sean: People are pretty interested in getting a handle on where CI departments fit into an organization. In some companies, it seems like every product marketing manager has a sub bullet for competitive planning in their job title.
In others, there’s sort of a shadow organization that does competitive analysis, but they have a hard time getting the job done because they don’t really have the authority they need. In still others, there’s a market research organization that answers questions from the rest of the company.
Of course, those are just examples, and there are any number of other possibilities, but how does Adobe lay it out, broadly speaking?
Mark: I have experienced all three of those organizational models in my career here, actually. Every product manager on staff has some bandwidth devoted to competitive activity, but their focus is usually concerned with product/feature level competitive activity.
When a competing product gets released, they will review its capabilities and how they compare against ours. Then they provide insight about technological advantages, the positioning advantages, etc. That’s not what our role is, however.
I have also seen competitive intelligence at the market-research level at Adobe, and that tended also to be very tactical and mostly the reporting of the news.
Both of those roles are useful, because part of having competitive intelligence is informing others who don’t have bandwidth in their role to keep abreast of what’s going on in the marketplace. That is especially true in a big company like Adobe where our interests are so broad.
Having CI as part of corporate development creates a more strategic imperative for the work that we provide, and that was really the premise that led us to create this role in corporate development. The management team desires a high-level perspective about competitive activity.
They also prefer a focus on strategic impact; in addition to recounting a competitive event, they are interested in the long-term implications of competitive developments and recommendations on how to act. And so creating a competitive intelligence role in corporate development broadens our perspective so we can see the bigger picture.
Sean: Before we get into some tactical stuff, what got you into CI? It’s not the kind of role that people graduate from school and go into.
Mark: Some of it is structural, and some of it is self-motivated. The structural part is that before my work at Adobe, I had a career in management consulting, so I was used to doing a lot of primary research in order to formulate a client strategy.
I also worked across a lot of virtual teams. A lot of the work that I do on the response-planning and scenario-planning side involves pulling together various stakeholders across the company. Their day job is not competitive intelligence, obviously, and trying to influence their thinking as we drive toward a response plan is very similar to the role I played as a consultant.
The self-motivation part was that I wanted exposure to more of the various interests across Adobe that I had only seen glimpses of while working as a product manger in one business unit.
A corporate development role was a great opportunity to do that, because here I became responsible for competitive activity across all of our interests. That means I had to learn everything that we were doing, which gives me the chance to look at the broad landscape of what Adobe does.
In the future, if I choose to go back into an operational role, I will have a much better perspective about where I would like to go next and where I could have the biggest impact.
Scott Swigart: You’ve mentioned response planning, which is pretty sophisticated as a CI role. How did that idea come about, and did you encounter barriers from people who were concerned that you were going to spend a lot of time developing contingency plans for things that mostly won’t actually happen?
Mark: There was a major threat on the horizon, probably about 24 months out, and the management team recognized that this threat might coalesce into something significant.
We decided to take a scenario-planning approach to the problem, to come up with a continuum of scenarios between the extremes of it having no impact on Adobe as a whole to having a significant impact on our ability to generate revenue in the future. Within that framework, we determined that by bringing together the right stakeholders, we could put together a series of contingent response plans.
The last part was to set up an early-warning-signal radar mesh, if you will, to identify precursors to these events, and to monitor them. The thought was that as we saw momentum building, we could adjust both our scenarios and our responses.
From those efforts a number of tactical response plans were developed and deployed as the warning signals came to pass. This is today an ongoing effort, and that monitoring system has proved extremely valuable because it has streamlined our response time and helped us to blunt the impact of the competitive activity being tracked.
Scott: In other words, the risk of inaction was too high to do nothing, so it was worth spending some time to develop a response plan and to set aside some budget to implement it.
Mark: That’s right.
Scott: There’s an old saying something like “The first casualty of war is the battle plan,” so if you were advising someone about this sort of contingency planning, how would you advise them in terms of how detailed of a plan they should make and what reasonable expectations are?
Mark: You’ve got to have really clear, well defined scenarios first of all. You can’t just say, “Company X is going acquire Company Y,” or “Product A is going to come out in 2009.” It needs to be much more detailed than that, and it also needs to have buy-in among all the stakeholders.
You have to spend a lot of time working with those stakeholders about what various scenarios are going to look like and what they are really going to mean. There is likely to be a lot of denial at first, which is an appropriate human response, but an inappropriate business response.
The second expectation is to be prepared for a lot of negotiation and debate, because oftentimes you are going to be dealing with content that people don’t want to acknowledge. I frequently have to help stakeholders come to terms with the real possibility of a negative outcome. Considering possible negative events in advance and creating a contingency plan can be very productive only after stakeholders get past the emotional component.
Social Network Analysis
One of the more fascinating applications of technology to advance intelligence analysis is social networking analysis. As defined in Kristan Wheaton’s blog:
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is fundamentally about entities and the relationships between them. As a result, this method has a number of variations within the intelligence community ranging from techniques such as association matrices through link analysis charts right up to the validated mathematical models. It is most commonly used as a way to picture a network, however, and is rarely used in the more formal way envisioned by the sociologists who created the method. In other words, while SNA is a very powerful method, intelligence professionals rarely take advantage of its full potential.
Kristan Wheaton, “Social network analysis,” December 11, 2008
link
(BTW, if you haven’t been reading Wheaton’s blog, you’re missing out on some interesting conversations. At a minimum, it’s worth looking at his review of the “Top 5 Intelligence analysis methods” posted in December 2008: Analysis of competing hypotheses, multi-criteria decision-making, SNA, intelligence preparation of the battlefield, and Bayesian analysis.)
SNA not only appropriately leverages technology to support analysis, it’s actually a well-documented technique for analyzing relationships. Here’s an excellent introduction to SNA:
Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, web sites, and other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships. Management consultants use this methodology with their business clients and call it Organizational Network Analysis [ONA]. Valdis Krebs http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html
I’d like to highlight SNA in an upcoming Competitive Intelligence Magazine, but I haven’t identifiedmany individuals who have applied it in a CI setting. (Other than August Jackson, who always seems to be ahead of the curve.)
If you’ve applied SNA in your own intelligence organization, I’d be interested in hearing both the good and the bad. By pooling our experiences, we can all advance our collective knowledge.
The value of serendipity
I’m always fascinated by what you can find just by looking into what other blogs a blog links to. It’s almost like following a scent trail. For example, through my daily blog searching on CI, I just stumbled on the blog “Investigate this? Blog and resources” http://albloggedup-investigative.blogspot.com/ which contains an extensive list of linked blogs. This one blog generated the following sources:
“Naval Open Source Intelligence” blog http://nosint.blogspot.com/ This one also lead to Stratfor “the world’s leading online publisher of geopolitical intelligence. Our global team of intelligence professionals provides our Members with insights into political, economic, and military developments to reduce risks, to identify opportunities, and to stay aware of happenings around the globe.” http://www.stratfor.com/ Which then lead to http://www.altlaw.org/ “the first free, full-text searchable database of Supreme Court and Federal Appellate case reports”; and http://www.justia.com/ “the company provides Internet users with free case law, codes, regulations, legal articles and legal blog databases.”
Another link is The Global Research webpage at www.globalresearch.ca “publishes news articles, commentary, background research and analysis on a broad range of issues, focusing on social, economic, strategic and environmental processes.” The original site also had a link to the Online Journalism blog, whose latest posting was on “Twitter for newsgathering,” http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/04/30/how-journalists-can-master-twitter/ That lead to www.journalismnet.com, “the investigative guide to internet research.”
Another link was to the Association of Internet Researchers, http://aoir.org/ which has the complete listing of their 2009 conference papers, and included a paper titled “Building spaces for hyperlocal citizen journalism. This reminded me that I have to include local blogs to local newspapers as a source for information on hard-to-find companies.
Or just to find a site whose name makes me smile: http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/ “From brief reports to continuing investigations, we hold the media accountable by examining concrete, measurable errors of fact and ethical breaches encountered in the press.” But it also contains relevant information for CI: “Practical tools and discussions target the skills needed by both readers and writers for testing and discerning facts from lesser parcels of information.”
I could go on all day, but close with : http://www.wikileaks.org/ “Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we are of assistance to people of nations who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.”
[Please note: site inclusion in this post does not equal endorsement of its contents.]