What’s next for competitive intelligence

What’s Next for Competitive
Intelligence?
• John McGonagle
• Managing Partner, The Helicon Group
Copyright 2011 The Helicon Group

A Little History
When this title meant something else!

Let’s Go Back in Time
• The Year: 1987
• The Speaker: Carolyn Vella, Founding partner,
The Helicon Group
• The Place: SCIP’s first annual meeting

The Message

CI’s Origins - A Brief Look at Some
Historical Forces
 Porter’s Paradigm
 Government intelligence agencies
 Data & Internet revolutions

Professor Michael Porter’s Work
 “Analyzing competitors is too important to handle
haphazardly.”
 Harvard Professor Michael E. Porter, Competitive Strategy, 1980
 Seminal strategic planning work positioned competitive
intelligence as the link allowing competitive strategy to
produce a competitive advantage
 Like many great books, more quoted than read

Government Intelligence Agencies
 Former government intelligence professionals put into the
private market, producing a pool of trained individuals helping
to develop CI and raising its visibility
 First, retirements from Cold War peaks
 Later, affirmative downsizing after fall of Soviet Union

 Commercialization of governmental technology adds to CI
capabilities in data gathering
 GPS + Satellite photos = Google Maps (and more)

 Now training/hiring of new intelligence personnel focuses
national attention on “need” for intelligence everywhere

Data & Communications
Revolutions - More Data Supported
Better Analysis
 1980s: online databases began to allow researchers to access
more qualitative data, more quickly, more currently, and
cheaper than in the past

Revolutions
 1990s: Internet allows virtual real time access to current
qualitative data

Revolutions
 2000s:
 You can learn about & access people on a global basis in near real time
– e.g. LinkedIn
 Data mining – digging through your own data – it may include some on
your competition

What Forces & Trends Will Impact CI as
We Know it?
• The Government
• Ways of thinking about CI
• Secondary Research
• Print media’s decline and cyber media’s rise

The Government – Two Views

How We Think About Intelligence
• Challenges to the way we think about
intelligence, driven by the resurgent studies
on governmental intelligence and the growth
of academic programs on intelligence

The Government
• Increasing government involvement in
information gathering and access due to the war
on terror
– In the US
• FOIA restrictions
• Disaggregation
• Internet “fairness”
• Sensitivity to FOIA/FOIL requests
– Around the world
• National limitations on Internet access/usage
• Business increasingly sensitive about providing data to
government

Education
Surprised?

Thinking About Intelligence
• Let’s kill the CI cycle!
– Seriously being debated
• Is there such a thing?
• Where did it come from?
• Does the idea do more harm than good?

CI Cycle

Without the CI Cycle

Thinking About Intelligence
• Open Source (the Government’s term) is
getting more important
– But dealing with social media as a source is getting
tougher
– More and more to go through

Open Source

Secondary Research – Then and Now

Outsourcing
• Cost driven
• Using India, for example, can buy time
• Underlying assumption – secondary is all that
is important

Outsourcing (cont.)
• Some appreciation that nearby is important,
too
• Sometimes cheap isn’t inexpensive

Changes in Media
• The low hanging fruit is no longer there
• Increasingly print media (and others) are
relying on the blogosphere for leads and even
stories
• More places for “news” means you need to
validate more people, more often

Print versus Cyber Media

The growth of social/business
networking sites
• Easier to find people to contact
– Ex-employees
• Tougher to keep a low profile
– They can Google you while you are trying to talk
to them

Social Media Pros & Cons
Add your
own
caption
Too many to handle?

As an Aside – A Defensive Tip – Google People
Who Call You – While You are Talking

The Shift of CI from a Craft to a Tool

So What is the Shape of Things to
Come?
• Elicitation - more important – more difficult
• More people doing “your” work – maybe not
including you!
– Move from separate CI unit to CI members of a
team to team members having CI skills
• Third parties (internal and external) will be
needed more for specialized skills, such as
management issues, training, and focused
assignments

Is It?

Questions?
• Now.
• If later, just contact me
– PO Box 199, Blandon, PA 19510
– 610-916-2081
– JJM@HELICONGROUP.COM

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