Competitive Intelligence

As Big Data technologies mature and organizations become convinced of their power, they will take on a broader role: informing competitive intelligence systems.

Social media creates a new information map. Competitive intelligence had in the past two sources of information: primarily from experts, competitors, employees, and suppliers, on the one hand, and secondary such as published data, articles, and market research, on the other.

Now competitive intelligence models can be built, identifying people and their conversations in social spaces.

This real-time information may help preempt key actions of competitors or lead to adjustments of strategy.

Intelligence analysts often gravitate toward the approved pattern of thinking within their function, potentially limiting the breadth of insight they distill and sometimes even interfering with their judgment. Curating a variety of perspectives from multiple social-media sources should help internal checks and balances play out more freely.

Leaders need to understand that decrypting weak signals may offer better strategic insights than the familiar patterns traditional intelligence sometimes serves up.

Analysts typically spend 80 percent of their time gathering information before they begin to analyze it. SDG’s framework allow analysts to create dynamic maps that pinpoint where information and expertise reside and to track new data in real time.

This Model can also provide windows into the plans of competitors, suppliers, and customers, using tools, such as network-mapping and influence-rating metrics.

Yet the availability of vast quantities of social-media data points has spawned an array of new analytic methods that can structure and derive insight from complex information.

Competitive intelligence reports often are formal documents can be dated by the time it gets into decision makers’ hands. By contrast, SDG Competitive intelligence architecture lets companies rapidly, even automatically, curate highly pertinent information—from news sources, Web discussions by experts and influencers, freshly minted market data, and customer feedback.