As a lone competitive intelligence agent, your role within your
company can be misunderstood. When you introduce yourself to new
colleagues, they often associate the term "competitive
intelligence" with corporate espionage or gathering
information by unethical and illegal means. Industry
professionals have done their best to dispel this misconception
through books and articles. Individuals who have attended
competitive intelligence training seminars have gained some
insight into the field; however, they still assume that agents
are just information brokers or at best, glorified librarians.
To the true professional competitive intelligence agent, any
comparisons to a librarian are false.
To clarify any confusion between the two related professions,
this article will discuss:
- Roles of the Competitive
Intelligence Agent and Librarian
- Daily Tasks Associated with
the Two Professions
- Tools Used by Each Profession
At the end
of this article, tips and suggestions will be given to help you
avoid becoming a librarian. In addition, the recommendations
will lead you to become a polished and complete competitive
intelligence professional.
Roles of the Competitive Intelligence Agent and Librarian
Before discussing the different roles of these two professions,
a detailed definition for each of them is needed.
Competitive Intelligence Agent: An individual who is
responsible for the process of discovering, analyzing, and
delivering intelligence from publicly available, non-proprietary
information sources for the purpose of becoming more competitive
in the marketplace. Source: E-monitor (Industry Canada)
Librarian: A person who is responsible for a collection of
specialized or technical information or materials. Source: The
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
See the difference yet? A majority of individuals often
remember the collection function of competitive intelligence and
completely ignore the analysis and delivering part of the field.
As a result, the line drawn between the two professions becomes
fuzzy and prompt people to remember the similarities of the
professions and forget the differences.
Now that we have clearly defined the professions, a deeper
analysis of the specific roles is needed.
The main role of a competitive intelligence agent is to
provide management with accurate and timely information for
strategic decision-making processes to remain or become
competitive. Not anyone can be molded to accept the role. The
person who is selected to become a skilled competitive
intelligence agent within the organization must be:
- Aware of
the developments in their company's industry
- Familiar with
online and offline resources pertinent to their company's
information needs
- Prepared to disseminate knowledge through
out the organization
As the competitive intelligence
practitioner becomes more in tuned with their role and
associated responsibilities, the agent will be able to bring
value-added content to the raw data that others within the
company have requested.
The librarian's principal role entails searching and storing
secondary data for others within the organization. They are in
place to answer any queries that may arise on any given day from
decision-makers.
Here are a few questions that might posed to a
business librarian inside a firm:
- Where can I find current
and past statistics regarding our industry?
- Do we have any
recent profiles on our competitors?
- What are the best sources
to extract current news and articles about the industry and
competitors?
Once these questions are answered, the librarian
must find an effective and efficient way to delivery the data
throughout the organization especially if the same queries are
posed regularly. The best tool to accomplish and fulfill this
role is to use a reliable Intranet solution.
Daily Tasks Associated with the Two Professions
Although
their roles can be centered on searching for information, the
daily tasks of both professionals are completely different.
These differences can be seen on two levels:
- Analysis; and
- Filtering and archiving
1. Analysis
After the research part of the job is done,
competitive intelligence agents must turn the raw data into
actionable intelligence. Actionable intelligence is the fuel
that drives your strategic plans and will only be discovered
after in-depth analysis. Using the multitude of analytical
models, agents must extrapolate relevant information to help
their company or client reach their strategic objectives. It
should be noted that depending on the mandate, the analysis task
is an ongoing process given the fact that new information can
influence many variables used in the analysis model.
Example:
You have just completed your first Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities, Threats analysis. Later on that day, your news
alerts services inform you that your main competitor has just
signed a partnership to improve their distribution channels. As
a result, your S.W.O.T. analysis is now outdated and invalid
since your opportunity to take advantage of your competitor's
weakness in the distribution of their goods has disappeared. As
result, you, the agent will spend time analyzing the present
business environment once again.
Successful analysis will lead to gaining instant respect from
colleagues who assume that your tasks are fairly easy and can be
done by anyone in the company.
2. Filtering and Archiving
Librarians spend the majority of
their time filtering and archiving information.
The filtering process seems to be a time-consuming task;
however, skilled librarians have at their disposal many tricks
and tools to screen relevant information. By screening the
information that is available online, librarians prevent their
organizations from information overload. Filtering information
by using keyword searches and alerts ensures that the right data
gets to the right person.
Archiving tasks are vital to any company that wishes to have
an efficient and systematic approach to managing their
information. Archiving ensures that information which has been
collected in the past is not misplaced and overlooked when it is
needed. The tasks behind proper archiving are:
- Indexing by
keywords
- Providing brief and precise abstracts of the data
when necessary
- Providing updates when new information becomes
available
Failure to complete these tasks on a regular basis
will lead individuals to the wrong place to find information.
Tools Used by Each Profession
Given the daily tasks of each
of these two professions, here are some tools that are used on
the job to provide the best possible results from their
resources:
Competitive Intelligence Agent:
- Meta search engines (Copernic)
- News monitoring services (paid or free)
- Industry specific
portals
- Analysis models. (S.W.O.T., Due Diligence, etc.)
Librarian:
- Meta search engines
- Archiving software (Webforia)
- Keyword alert services
- Subscription to corporate databases
- Web-clipping services
Conclusion
This article attempted to clarify the differences
between the competitive intelligence and the librarian
professions. Many competitive intelligence agents who work in
medium-sized businesses often get labeled as glorified
librarians due to the fact that the two professions perform
related tasks.
If you are a competitive intelligence agent in
this situation in your company, here are a couple of suggestions
that will help you become more than an individual who carries
out librarian functions:
- Assemble the best resources on the
Web that will have strategic value to your company's objectives.
- Examine the content you have been asked to find. Summarize
your findings and make your opinions known about what the
information means to your company.
- Present your findings in a
clear manner that will be easy for management to analyze and use
to make decisions.
- Familiarize yourself with simple and
straightforward analysis tools/model and see what kind of
information is needed to apply the tool for the correct
situation.
Want to know more ? The following books are available at
Amazon.com:
Do you want to meet Conor Vibert ? You liked his book and
want to meet the author ? He will be presenting at Competia
Symposium next June...
