Imagine you had all
your competitor’s trade secrets, their client list or their
credit report. How much of a competitive advantage would that give
you? How much would that information be worth to you? Well, for
many companies it is worth a lot, because they spend millions of
dollars on intelligence gathering. Many use covert means to
collect information and data, which is in essence, espionage, (an
illegal method of collecting intelligence).
Business intelligence helps companies gain competitive
advantage and gain power over their competitors. Business
intelligence is the practice and process of gathering information
and data for analysis purposes to draw conclusions that will help
one’s own agenda. There are ways of gathering competitive or
business intelligence information and data, while still remaining
ethical, within legal limits and without spending a fortune. To
learn more about ways of collecting business intelligence
information in an ethical fashion one must examine three (3) major
forms of information gathering.
Basic Intelligence This is the fundamental,
factual information about a business’ characteristics. These
characteristics include: location, major assets, general size,
number of employees, news sources about the company, etc. Such
intelligence is gathered through 'open sources', like the news and
publicly available records. Basic intelligence is the foundation
of further intelligence.
Economic Intelligence Is much like basic
intelligence, in that it strives to collect fundamental
information through open sources, however at the regional market
or nation level. Most small companies do not have to deal with
this type of intelligence gathering.
Industrial Espionage Is any or both basic or
economic intelligence using covert or illegal means. This includes
internal spying, external surveillance, bribery and all sorts of
other neat stuff.
Most businesses only need to engage in basic business
intelligence.
The information and data collected using this method, basic
business intelligence, is actually not intelligence. Information
and data only become intelligence once they have been analyzed. To
bring all this together we will use an example.
Intelligence Gathering Example
You are in the auto body repair industry. First intelligence move,
grab the yellow pages (an open source) and find out who your local
competitors are (auto body repair is a highly localized market).
Now, go check out all their websites, where you can usually find
tons of info about each individual company. Go scope out each of
their buildings or facilities, check out how big they are, what
kind of equipment they have. Get their brochures. Pretend to be a
potential customer and get a price list off them. Once you have
collected all this information and data, you can now start
analyzing it and create business intelligence out of it. Through
analysis, you can conclude what the average local competitor
charges. Who the big players are, what kind of equipment they
have. You can also find market trends, like where customers are
coming from or how large of a potential customer base has not been
yet touched, etc. All the conclusions that come out from your
analysis is your business intelligence information, because that's
the information that will give you the competitive advantage.
Well, this is obviously a simple example we used, however, we
hope it paints a picture of how basic business intelligence is
gathered and hopefully some one can put it into practice.
