Competitive intelligence the Dao2com way

Competitive intelligence the Dao2com way...

(Or how can you predict what are your competitors moves, and much more)

I know that many papers have been written about competitive intelligence and methods to accomplish it but, I want to share with every one the methodology and the working patterns that we use at dao2com and the way they’re embedded into our products line.

As every one knows the Competitive intelligence work is based on the Intelligence cycle pattern. This cycle starts in defining your goals and the way to achieve them. After that you’ll start looking through all the sources that are available to you (Published info, SIGINT, HUMINT, VISINT and so on) for data that can help you to achieve your goals. Then you’ll analyze the data and drawn the conclusions. If and when you come into conclusion you’ll provide them to the relevant party in your organization. After all, your entire conclusion mean nothing if some actions won’t be taken.

I will focus in this essay on the first and the second steps in the intelligence cycle. My first assumption is that we based our conclusions upon published information. We can define any goal and the way to achieve it but when we come to collect the data the only legal information that available to us is the published one. This may sound obvious but that assumption actually sets the way to carry out the Intelligence cycle. We can come up with a “way” to achieve our goals, but if that “way” can’t be based upon published data we will not be able to enforce or negate it through the analyzing step. And if we can’t finish the analysis step how could we come into any conclusion?

And so, after we came to this we can define our goals.

I’ll start off with a casual scenario. For that matter our case will be: “Has my competitor Z started to use new technology that will decrease his product cost?”

We based our definition of the ways to accomplish the goals on another assumption. Every action taken by person or firm isn’t come from nowhere. There are pre-action that has been taken by our target before he took the action that we are interesting in. if I want to be more colorful and clear I can take the example of the stone throw to the water. Well after the stone hit the water and fall to the bottom there are still little circular waves on the surface of the water. So if you are looking at water and you see those circular waves you know that something hit the water. Surely that like there is little facts after the action there are also little fact before the action of throwing the stone has been taken. So if we want to know if our competitor examine new technologies we need to find what are the action that he might take before he really start to examine the technology.

The easy way to do it is to find out what the competitor, others or even you done before such action will be taken. This way or another we all human and we intend to do the same when we need to accomplish simple tasks. Those actions that you find or figure out are the “actions” that need to be negated or enforced in our model.

The problem now is who to enforce or negate if those action really took place. If we will come back to our sample, one of the first obvious steps that our competitor will take is to look for employee with knowledge with new technologies. So we want to find out if this really happened. The problem is how to do it? Maybe our sample is easy to accomplish but it pretty clear that we can’t ask our competitor what are intentions are? This led us to use known intelligence concept the cycle's concept. This concept is simple but he is very helpful to us.

It goes like this we got a target this is the base cycle. It is very hard to penetrate this cycle. To do it we need to use HUMINT methodologies witch aren’t legal or ethic to be used by none governmental bodies and we are good guys. The penetration into the inner cycle is so hard due to the level of liability of the persons in that cycle to our target. Now as the distance between outer cycles and the inner cycle (target) increase the liability of the persons in that cycle decrease. So, we can got much more information from the third and the second cycles then the inner one. Hypothetically there are no limits to the cycles but in some point the cycle is so far from the inner one so people there don't know any thing and we can't learn from them. Usually we take in account 3 layers of cycles. The first - inner, the second: suppliers, friends, customers and so, the third: suppliers of suppliers, friends of friends, suppliers of customers and every one who got any connection to someone in the first cycle. The easy cycle to enter is the third but the data that we will receive is less meaningful that we will get from the second cycle that is harder to enter.

 

The cycle concept

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now let’s take all the information and convert them into one picture. We want to know something about our competitor. The competitor keeps his intentions in secret. We can base our research on public data only. We wont find directly the competitor secret in the publish data. Every move that the competitor done, accompanied by others actions. It easier to find data about the competitor form persons and firms from the third cycle. So if we look for evidence about the action from data sources that come from the second cycle and on we can figure out if our competitor is going to use new technology.

I hope that all the stages that I present by now can lead you to a conclusion that what we are looking for is actually collection of little pieces of information that aren’t important or meaningful by them self and some times even unreliable. But if we find most of those information in the published data we can come into conclusion that our target action happened or going to be happen.

If we can agree on it we can agree on the next sentence: “If we are looking for small pieces of information, in today global market we have to look in public information in any language”. After all we can’t know what someone in Japan say about our area of interest. Maybe there is publication of technology producer in Japanese that say that our competitor is checking his product. Such publication feet our way of working: its little piece of information and it come from the first cycle of our target.

We at Dao2Com use this way of working every time we need to find information from any type. We found this way of working productive every time we use it. Its help us to plane not just what we are looking for but who we intend to accomplish it. After we prove to ourselves and other that this way of working comes out with results we embedded it into our product line.