How and for whom to do Competitive Intelligence Reporting

Competitive Intelligence reports are a tool for reflection and decision-making in the company. The Intelligence Function is being implemented for the first time in many companies, and the management of intelligence reports can raise questions.

Let's discuss how to approach the development of such reports within the company.

What are Competitive Intelligence Reports?

Intelligence reports are a means of aggregating market signals, analysing their implications for the company, and generating suggestions for action.

As another means of exploiting market information, we should use it for the appropriate needs of our company. We should combine reports with other means of exploiting market information, depending on their degree of elaboration and immediacy of consumption:

• Market signals: the typical daily alerts we are all familiar with.
• Automatic grouping of signals: in the format of "intelligence magazines" that allow us to follow specific topics or intelligence activity by department or project.
• Intelligence reports: reflections elaborated on a set of market signals collected over some time.

Competitive intelligence reports should always be oriented to support decision-making. The types of decisions we can support with an intelligence report are:

• Within the scope of a project. For example, Technology Watch reports strengthening an innovation project and review decisions already taken on technology or procedures adopted in the project, as we addressed in The State of the Art report and Technology Watch in innovation projects and The Blind Side: Technology Watch for a resilient innovation project.
• At the departmental level. For example, monitoring what emerging technology is being adopted by the sector, to make decisions about our technological upgrade or differentiation. What regulatory projects are in the pipeline that could affect our business?  Or what talent management best practices we can adopt in the company?
• At the corporate level. For example, analysing competitors' strategies in various fields, including alliances with new players and start-ups. Or, as an example, analysing markets to prioritise our international investments. We can also monitor potential new niches, such as the new cultured meat market, to make strategic investment decisions at the right time. Not forgetting the Foresight reports supporting the review of the Strategic Plan.

Our first suggestion: never develop a Competitive Intelligence or Technology Watch report that no one has asked for. It will usually result in work that is not used to the company's advantage.

For whom to develop a Competitive Intelligence Report?

Let us address the question of who is the client for whom we develop the report. The client can be internal or external.

In the case of internal customers we can distinguish the different decision-makers as mentioned above:

• Project managers
• Innovation managers
• Sales managers, export managers, etc.
• Responsible for defining the strategy or strategic plan, including the members of the Board.

We have mentioned the external client of the reports. Are there external clients of an intelligence report if we are not a consultancy?

Although it may seem that the Intelligence Function generates key information internally to the company, this is not always the case. If we are monitoring our market and capturing key information, why not select some of it for our clients? We have already made the effort, why not take advantage of it by generating a double benefit?

We can pass on some of the information we collect to our customers, informing them of key industry developments, providing them with a value-added service, and positioning our company as an intelligent organisation in the minds of our customers.

Antara Mussol is specifically designed to respond to this opportunity. It incorporates a multitude of functions and options to take advantage of intelligence information for the benefit of your customers in a very easy and productive way.

How to make a Competitive Intelligence Report

Firstly, and although it may seem obvious, it should not be led by a person with no knowledge of the company or the sector. We have been amazed to see large companies entrusting market surveillance to interns and even to students in their Final Degree Projects who successively take turns in the role. They do not know the company, its strategic plan, its challenges, nor the sector in general, and what is more, they will not get to know it in the few weeks or months that they are going to carry out this task. They are mere lists of news, with no depth of analysis, and which the recipients keep or delete without reading (we have seen this), as they are already used to the fact that they do not add value.

We have seen this situation even in large IBEX-listed companies, and it is something shareholders would not like if they knew about it.

The first recommendation for developing a Competitive Intelligence report is that it should be collaborative. It should be developed from the bottom up. All the experts on the team who have something to say about the topic should be involved in its development. They will be the ones who can contribute the most value to specific news or information that our Competitive Intelligence software will have filtered for them. Then we have one or two people - perhaps from the same team of analysts - who will compile that information and write an executive summary.

The executive summary must be short (it is a summary!), with the equivalent of one or two pages, making reference to the most important news and, above all, it must be useful. In other words, it must provide value, relate the information to each other, and generate conclusions and/or proposals for action. It will be accompanied by the most relevant market signals, with analysts' comments, so that the reader can expand on the information.

The executive summary cannot be a mere list of news items. We have to "get involved" and add value.

On report confidentiality

Reports must always respond to a need for reflection and decision-making, and sometimes the matter in question is confidential even within the company. We can imagine cases such as the purchase and sale of a company, the incorporation of substitute technology for the current one. Situations in which the wide dissemination of information in the company can lead to a disruption of the project, generating resistance earlier than desired, or any other negative effect.

We, therefore, need to define the degree of confidentiality of the report, and which individual persons should have access to it. Unauthorised persons should not even know that the report is published.

However, in a collaborative environment in which we want to make a company smarter and more resilient to threats, we must avoid islands of knowledge, and therefore we should not restrict access to reports between people from different departments or projects.

Anyone should be able to know what is happening in the market from the perspective of a department other than their own.

On the report frequency

There will be reports that have a single issue, as they support a particular issue, and are not reworked.

However, most business intelligence reports are recurrent publications that analyse the market and publish findings every few weeks. Here we find a very varied casuistry. From companies that are launching daily reports for the entire workforce (with little analysis, obviously), to reports that are published in three perspectives and an annual edition, aimed only at board members, to assist them in the review of corporate strategy.

We have also found companies developing more than a dozen reports simultaneously on the most diverse topics, which always include monitoring competitors' strategies, new technology with potential impact on the sector, or expected regulatory changes.

The importance of the report format

Today, developing a report in a file and distributing it by email is doing things the way they were 30 years ago. Today's technology allows us to develop shared reports in interactive formats, where report readers can add value to the report itself and interact with the analysts.

Antara Mussol offers advanced functions for the management and publication of interactive reports, where not only does the community of readers also generate value, but they can also audit the quality of the analysis performed so that they can have even more confidence in the value generated.

Furthermore, by preventing copies of the report from circulating freely we'll increase cybersecurity, as there is no way to control what happens to an intelligence report once it has been attached to an email and sent. Just to mention one of the associated risks: most recipients will carry it on their mobile phones, perhaps with few security measures in place.

Metrics... Always the metrics

What cannot be measured does not exist. Too often reports are produced and circulated without any knowledge of their real impact. Not even if they have been read or by whom. It may be that old-school people, who have been producing reports with no impact for a long time, find it convenient to maintain the status quo. Out of sight, out of mind. But it is not in the company's interest. We must be able to measure the actual consumption and impact of the information generated, on a nominal basis. To be able to improve and demonstrate the Return on Investment of the Intelligence Function.

Credits: Dilbert cartoon reproduced with permission of Andrews McMeel Licensing.

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The opinions of the authors reflect their views and not those of the company.