There is an old saying: “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. It is interpreted as suggesting “said when there are too many people involved in trying to do the same thing, so that the final result will not be good.
Scot Kim, senior research director at Gartner, seems to think so. In a blog post, he wrote that large companies have managed competitive intelligence for years.
“However, through multiple acquisitions and/or partnerships have caused competitive intelligence to become a decentralized team. Meaning that competitive intelligence is fragmented across different organizations. It may not be prudent to centralize competitive intelligence due to the multiple markets these mega-vendors are in,” he added.
He cited the example of Dell which owns VMware, which came as part of the EMC acquisition.
“I can only imagine Dell has a myriad of competitive analysts in each of the different companies and even that there are probably multiple analysts in each different department like product management, product marketing, sales, etc.,” suggested Kim.
To remedy this problem, he proposes creating a competitive intelligence committee.
Kim defined competitive intelligence as “identifying what your competitive landscape looks like, who are the potential competitors and how to displace them.”
He cautioned not to mistake competitive intelligence from market intelligence, which is about identifying new emerging trends and knowing when the market is declining.
He further suggests that each cannot deliver the full potential of each, but at the same time neither can one be subjugated into the other. He opined that collaboration and working lock-step together maybe the better approach.
“Market intelligence cannot be done in a vacuum. However, competitive intelligence can be isolated, however, from a big-picture perspective, without market intelligence; competitive can be misleading. Tracking one or two competitors will not help your company growth, particularly during the downturn,” he continued.
Kim lists the steps for companies in their quest to create a high-performing competitive intelligence committee:
- Have a common mission statement that aligns to all of the different competitive intelligence teams
- Utilize a common content management platform for all CI analysts can liberally share competitive collateral. Also, make it collaborative.
- Knockdown any politic jockeying of egos. Be sure to be as one and not be seen as many. Have a win all or lose all mentality as a committee
- By combining the brainchild of competitive intelligence as a body of one, competitive intelligence can increase product revenue by 3.2x.
