How do you define CI?
July 30, 2008 · SCIP
Curious about what a person would see if they searched Google for the definition of competitive intelligence, I came up with the usual 1M+ results. Below, in order of appearance, are the top 10 definitions. Which do you agree with? What definition does your organization use?
Bonnie Hohhof
1. A necessary, ethical business discipline for decision making based on understanding the competitive environment. (scip.org)
2. A systematic and ethical programme for gathering, analysing, and managing any combination of Data, Information, and Knowledge concerning the Business environment in which a company operates that, when acted upon, will confer a significant Competitive advantage or enable sound decisions to be made. Its primary role is Strategic early warning. (Vernon Prior, Language of CI.scip.org)
3. A process that transforms disaggregated information into relevant, accurate and usable strategic knowledge about competitors, position, performance, capabilities and intentions. (Glossary, SensaCom.com)
4. The systematic gathering of open information when collated and analyzed provides a better understanding of a competitor firm’s structure, culture, behavior, capabilities, and weaknesses. (glossary, fbig.ca)
5. The action of gathering, analyzing, and applying information about products, domain constituents, customers, and competitors for the short term and long term planning needs of an organization. (wikipedia.com)
6. The purposeful and coordinated monitoring of your competitor(s), wherever and whoever they may be, within a specific marketplace. (aurorawdc.com)
7. the gathering of information about a business’ competitors to make one’s own business more competitive, the kind of market research designed and carried out to find and keep a business’ market share. (about.com)
8. A process which includes three basic sub-processes: collecting information, analysis to turn information into intelligence, and dissemination of intelligence to identified intelligence customers inside the business. (emp-is.com)
9. A process - using legal and ethical means - for discovering, developing, and delivering timely, relevant intelligence needed by decision makers wanting to make their organizations more competitive (worksys.com)
10. Continuous process of monitoring a firm’s industry or market to identify current and future competitors, their current and announced activities, how their actions will affect the firm, and how to respond. (businessdictionary.com)
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8 Responses to “How do you define CI?”
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The absence of an agreed definition for CI should be of concern to the field. It is further evidence that we are still struggling to accurately determine exactly what CI is. Just about everybody has come up with their own definition of CI, usually to serve their own purposes. Whether they be practitioner, vendor, academic, consultant or any other “type” you care to mention, they have all had a go. These constantly changing definitions are usually based on nothing more than symantics.
Might I suggest that a more learned and mature discussion can be found in Brody (2008), Journal of Competitive Intelligence & Management, Vol 4, No 3, pp 3-15. Apart from receiving very favourable peer reviews, on first publication, this article has since received considerable attention from respected scholars, publishers and Doctoral students alike. Whilst accepting that academic writing is not to everybody’s taste, it would be nice if SCIP staff, and practitioners, realised that there is more intellectual effort going on than can be found on Google. As SCIP has failed on three occasions now, to support the publication of academic work and intellectual effort, one should not be too suprised when the bar is continually lowered in terms of CI knowledge and advancement.
Actually a lot of academic work and intellectual effort can be found on Google Scholar. Applied properly, the various elements of Google search (such as limiting results to .edu) are effective ways to track what is going on in an academic community.
Intellectual effort is not limited to an academic environment. The competitive intelligence community members apply research and analysis expertise everyday, and produce CI knowledge through various venues that rival the output of many scholars. Although they do not publish through academic venues, a very vibrant and intellectually questioning environment is developing through Web 2.0 vehicles (for examples, see entries in the SCIP.org news section).
Semantics, after all, is “the meaning or the interpretation of a word, sentence, or other language form.” I would be most interested in hearing your and others’ interpretation of what CI is.
I think Ben Gilad made a great point when he said (paraphrase) “CI is fundamentally about an organization’s ability to compete effectively. “A letter to a CEO” one of my favourite Competitive Intelligence Magazine articles–it’s a classic. Please give me an email if you’d like a copy (notetohelen@gmail.com).
Helen
p.s. Michael Porter measures competitiveness as productivity.
I disagree with Sheila that the absence of an agreed definition is a problem. A dynamic field will have many different facets and this will give rise to different definitions. For example, the American Marketing Definition of Marketing differs from that of the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing, which differs from that given by leading marketing gurus in their text books.
There’s nothing wrong in having multiple definitions. The problem is that the definitions differ in so many ways - unlike the definitions for marketing mentioned, which all share common features and are essentially semantic variations of the same thing.
This lack of a unifying definition IS a concern as it means that there is no real understanding of what CI is. Just looking at the definitions given - only 3 out of the 10 mention that CI should be ethical while 3 only look at competitors and seem to ignore the overall competitive environment. Some view it as a just process rather than a necessary business function. Some mention the purpose of CI - i.e. to improve competitiveness & decision making, etc. while others seem to see it as separate from the decision making and strategic processes within the organization. So in this, Sheila is correct - and there is a need for people to look at different perspectives and unify them into an agreed definition. Surely the academic world is better placed to do this than a motley bunch of consultants, vendors and practitioners.
As for Google Scholar - this just reflects the academic world and academic journals. Even Google Scholar does not view itself as a replacement for real academic research and such searches need to be quality checked and filtered. For example, this comes from the Google Scholar help pages: “Each Google Scholar search result represents a body of scholarly work.” (Note: Body - not entirety). The help pages continue: “This may include one or more related articles, or even multiple versions of one article. For example, a search result may consist of a group of articles including a preprint, a conference article, a journal article, and an anthology article, all of which are associated with a single research effort.”
This means that using Google Scholar is a guide to scholarly work - but can’t be used as a substitute for such work. To do so would be bad research.
Further, although I agree that intellectual effort is not limited to academia, it is rare that human knowledge (including CI) advances without academic involvement. The top CI thinkers today are generally involved in some respects with academia or the academic community: e.g Ben Gilad, John Prescott, Sheila Wright, Craig Fleisher for example have or held academic posts, while consultants/ practitioners such as Babette Bensoussan work with academics (Craig Fleisher) or publish in academic journals (e.g. Leonard Fuld in the Harvard Business Review).
Besides the mentioned necessary definition of CI as a standard business discipline for general guidance and positioning (where some of the brilliant academic work can and should be taken in account) I believe that practical CI complicates the effort to describe CI in more detail.
Depending on business model, place of origin of initial CI efforts and educational state of management as well as resources available the practical and real world setup and impact of CI varies greatly.
Any CI function or activity diverts from theory almost instantly as soon as individuals and organizations are involved who never had and never will have any exposure to the great academic ground work many CI practitioners will base their work on.
In order not to create an artificial divide between theory and reality any attempt to generally describe and position CI as a business discipline and career will undoubtedly have to consider both: the academic preparation and the real world implementation.
SCIP’s configuration as a construct of great minds from all walks of life including academic, business and commercial stakeholders would be ideally positioned to probe such definitions based on member request and their input.
Firstly though, the question would have to be asked and answered as to what and how could this answer support the CI community. Once it is understood what decisions are to be supported by the answer, SCIP could attempt to produce a definition in response to above question - much like any CI activity should support the decision making process of any manager requesting and consuming intelligence.
I follow this very interesting discussion and would like to add my comment which might deviate from the high intellectual level of discussion. As trained military Intel officer and CI consultant I just stick to a translation of the short military doctrine to the business world: “CI is the process of collecting and transforming a broad range of information into intelligence which supports the executive in pursuing his strategic goals.” Sorry, it might be too short and…ah… I know I am relating to the ugly military world. But let’s face it - that’s were lots of the business concepts are coming from, well, even the vocabulary.
Hope that helps,
Giselher
Giselher,
I think you have 99% of the perfect answer. If you don’t mind, I would like to add a tiny 1% to your short and excellent definition.
“CI is the process of collecting and transforming a broad range of information into intelligence which supports the strategic goals of the corporate executives, the group executives and staff, and, the unique goals and requirements of each business unit, the entity which must holistically align its activities and strategic positioning to compete in its respective industry - the arena where true competition takes place.”
Hope that helps,
Alan
Alan,
thank you for your helpful reply. Yes, you are right. Actually, CI supports both executives and field forces with dedicated and customized Intel products. And yes, it is integrated in a holistic approach.
Thanks Alan for your clarification and best regards from sunny Cairo, Egypt.
Giselher