Competitive Intelligence - Knowledge counts in large amounts
Information World Review, 10 April 2001
Vol 31, Issue 5
Arthur Weiss, managing partner of competitive intelligence consultants AWARE, provides an overview of how competitive intelligence researchers use the internet. At the 1993 Online Information exhibition a small company information supplier called Infocheck announced the launch of a new internet-based service for obtaining company financials. Infocheck was fully aware of the value of the information in these for competitive intelligence professionals, and part of its overall strategy was to make information available through as many channels as possible. At the time, however, most competitive information still involved phoning for company brochures and price lists or picking these up at trade shows, scouring the trade press for news snippets, and tapping as wide a network of contacts as possible for anything useful. The more technologically astute researcher would also use the command-level versions of search tools such as Data-Star, Dialog and other host database services, as well as proprietary services from companies like Infocheck. Today, much of the same information can be found on the internet - with a lot less effort. The internet has not replaced primary research or the human intelligence skills required for effective competitive intelligence research. But what it has done is make secondary research faster, cheaper and easier. The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP; www.scip.org) - the competitive intelligence industry's professional body - defines competitive intelligence (CI) as 'the process of monitoring the competitive environment'. SCIP continues by saying that 'CI enables senior managers in companies of all sizes to make informed decisions about everything from marketing, R&D, and investing tactics to long-term business strategies'. Throughout history, businesses have tried to obtain information about competitors to protect their operations and take advantage of competitor weaknesses. In some cases the methods used involved subterfuge, leading to accusations of spying and industrial espionage. In contrast, competitive intelligence as practised by SCIP members, takes a different approach: only looking for information that is in the public domain. The secret is in knowing where to look and how to manage the resulting knowledge to gain meaningful insights. The internet has led to an increase in both the quantity and accessibility of publicly available information. In addition, whereas in the past some information would only have been obtainable via interviews or commercial database searching, much can now be found, at low or no financial cost, by using internet search tools. The starting point for any internet search for competitor information is the competitor's own web site. A full analysis of competitor web sites should not, however, look at just the basic content - it should dig deeper. An assessment of the coding used, the site's structure and other background features can reveal information including how the competitor sees itself, its technological skills, its e-commerce strategy and sometimes even more. The Boeing web site includes a full list of its suppliers, and the contracts Boeing requires suppliers to sign. The recently failed e-retailer, Intersaver, included test pages for about-to-be-launched products, and these were available up to a month before launch. As well as an assessment of the competitor's own site, it is important to find out where and how the competitor is mentioned on other sites, and how easy it is to find the competitor when searching for it using selected key words. Suppliers will often mention its customers - and this can be a quick way of identifying who is selling to whom. Protest groups will mention competitor sites and may also hold considerable negative information about the competitor that previously would have been circulated only among a relatively small group of people. In some cases, competitors are included as part of a case study. Links to, and from, a site can convey information on company relationships and alliances. The domain names owned by the competitor can give indications of new plans, in the same way as the registration of a trademark or the filing of a patent can give indications of business strategy. When checking out a competitor, it is worth looking to see where and how the major search tools list the site. This will become even more important over the years as sites start paying for placement. Apart from company web-sites, other sites will hold information on competitors. Only a few years ago, a search for patent information or archive news could be expensive and require great skill. Such information is now available for free. Patent information from the main patent registrars is available on the Delphion web site ( www.delphion.com) as well as the respective registry offices themselves (www.uspto.gov; www.epo.org), while trademark data can be found on www.nameprotect.com . Job postings also give much valuable information about a company. Job advertisements can indicate changes in corporate structure, or new development areas. However, as job advertisements can be published in a variety of different publications, it is difficult to monitor these effectively. The internet removes this drawback, and the growth of the internet recruitment market makes tracking such company changes much easier. Financial information on public companies is readily available through sites such as CAROL (www.carol.com ) and www.corporateinformation.com, as well as the Edgar Securities & Exchange Commission database for US information (www.sec.gov). Stock market information, including broker assessments, are available via companies like Hemmington Scott ( www.hemscott.com ) as well as investor services such as the Motley Fool (www.fool.co.uk) and Interactive Investor (www.iii.co.uk). The latter sites are also useful for rumours and hearsay - their bulletin boards sometimes hold tips that have filtered from analysts to potential investors. A further company site that holds a wealth of detailed analysis including company news is Hoover's - covering companies in the US and Europe ( www.hoovers.com ). Company news is also obtainable from web services supplied by traditional host database services such as Factiva ( www.factiva.com ) as well as a number of new suppliers including the Financial Times' ft.com web site, moreover.com and the Northern Light search engine ( www.northernlight.com , www.nlresearch.com) . The latter also includes, for a relatively low cost, market research and stockbroker analyses. Much useful CI information on the web will not be found using standard search tools and so deep web search directories are an essential part of the CI specialist's armoury for finding key intelligence information for answering R&D, market, product and other similar questions. Such tools include Brint (www.brint.com), the Invisible Web (www.invisibleweb.com), www.refdesk.com and Gary Price's Direct Search service (gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/direct.htm). For specific industries there are also a number of industry portals, covering a variety of narrow business areas. VerticalNet ( www.verticalnet.com ) is a good starting point for such sites and includes portals covering 58 separate markets. Information on emerging markets can be obtained from the ISI Emerging Markets service ( www.securities.co.uk ) while M&A, start-up and IPO data is held on several sites including Zephus ( www.zephus.com ) and IPOCentral from Hoover's ( www.ipocentral.com ). A problem with much competitor information is that it dates quickly. Because effective CI anticipates what will happen, rumours and expert opinions are important. CI analysts should subscribe to the numerous newsgroups and mailing lists available on the web. Deja.com, recently acquired by Google, is a prime source for newsgroup information. Unfortunately, it is less easy to search mailing list archives. Although some - such as Freepint ( www.freepint.co.uk ), aimed at the information industry itself - do have fully searchable archives, most are transient. The only way to keep abreast of any relevant news is to subscribe to the newsletter and monitor each posting. An additional benefit for both newsgroups and mailing lists is that independent experts will often subscribe, and it is possible to contact such experts directly via email to gain their opinions. Although the internet has been a boon to CI research, the quantity of information available is potentially a problem. Much information will be promotional, inaccurate or contradictory and in many cases it is difficult to tell the age of the data on a web site. An added complication to this is that some web sites are knowingly misleading visitors from competing companies. It is relatively simple to identify the origin of site visitors and using this information it is possible to redirect unwanted visitors to alternative web pages. Sites such as SafeWeb ( www.safeweb.com) can help hide a browser's identify but the quality of the information found on the web remains a problem. Thus, though the internet has simplified the collection process, CI analysts need to spend extra time evaluating the quality of information found, comparing it to knowledge from other sources to establish a picture of the true situation. While Infocheck had been unusually prescient in realising the potential that the internet was offering for company, and competitor information, it is doubtful that it could have realised how important a source the internet would become for competitive intelligence.Today, Infocheck is a footnote in the history of CI and the internet as, in 1995, it was acquired by rival information supplier, Equifax.
Copyright © Arthur Weiss, 1998.
Note: Several of the web-sites referred to in this article are no longer available, or have changed their name, location or function. For an up-to-date listing of sites of relevance to competitive intelligence professionals visit AWARE's competitive intelligence links pages.
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