NBN Study: Were the right questions asked?
Earlier this month, the Australian government released the implementation study for the National Broadband Network. The scope of the study was to:
“advise Government on how best to implement its stated policy objectives, not to evaluate those objectives, given that the policies have already been agreed by Government. This report therefore focuses on translating high-level policy objectives into tangible actions for both Government and NBN Co to implement. Explicitly, it does not:
- Evaluate Government’s policy objectives;
- Evaluate the decision to implement the NBN via the establishment of NBN Co;
- Undertake a cost-benefit analysis of the macro-economic and social benefits that would result from the implementation of a superfast broadband network.” (NBN Implementation Study, 06/05/2010)
The report is clearly directed at answering the question of how to deliver the NBN in a way that meets the governments policy objectives. It very explicitly states that out of scope is if the NBN should be built, or built according to the governments objectives.
There’s a couple of ways to look at the decision to define the scope this way.
Tags: KIQ, KPMG, McKinsey, NBN, Stephen Conroy
Kaggle, competitions and competitive intelligence
Today, economist and blogger Nicholas Gruen announced that he had become chairman of Kaggle.com. Kaggle is a service that allows companies to run data-modelling and prediction competitions. Two type of competitions are supported – competitions to predict the past and competitions to predict the future.
“Predicting the past requires contestants to build models that are evaluated against a past event (the idea being that highly performing models can then be adopted by the competition host) … Predicting the future requires contestants to make predictions about a future event. Organizations may then choose to act on predictions made by contestants who have a history of forecasting accurately. ” (Kaggle.com 14/04/2010)
Nicholas cites a couple of sources of inspiration for Kaggle. First is the Netflix Prize, where an online movie provider offered $1m to whoever could improve it’s movie recommendation algorithm by 10%. Second is Innocentive, a service that enables companies to post technical and business challenges online, with cash rewards for the best answers received. Kaggle also seems to borrow a little from prediction market sites like Intrade, especially with respect to its competitions for predicting the future.
So why should those with an interest in competitive intelligence (CI) be interested in Kaggle?
Tags: data mining, Kaggle, modelling, Nicholas Gruen, predicition
Smarter searching for all – Part 1
For most people , putting a few words into the standard Google search box is about as sophisticated as their searching gets. But in certain jobs, like competitive intelligence (CI), being able to go beyond basic searching is a critical skill. Earlier this year, smarter searching was one of the topics discussed at a get together of Sydney based CI practitioners. Inspired by the suggestions shared at that session, plus my own experience, I thought I might do a few posts on how to improve your search for information on the net.
Tags: Google, search, smarter searching
In CI – better answers start with better questions
Competitive intelligence (CI) is a discipline with the potential to provide organisations with valuable insights in to how to perform better. But like most things, the quality of the output is influenced by the quality of the inputs. In CI, one of the key inputs is the questions that it is expected to answer.
If you’re looking for a phrase to simultaneously sink the spirit of a CI practitioner and cause their blood pressure to rise, try making a request that sounds something like “Can you just tell me about our competitors…”
Requests that begin like this risk turning out to be too vague, too broad or too late to be genuinely useful. Whilst it’s part of the CI practitioner’s role to help clients refine their key intelligence question, having put some thought in to what you really want to know beforehand will impress your CI provider and help improve the insights that are delivered.
So how do you get your CI engagement off to a better start? Here’s three simple suggestions to get you started.
What’s your competitors character?
What’s the character of your competitors? Are they Guardians or Idealists? What about the temperament of their leaders?
Understanding the character of a company and it’s leaders is a useful way of distinguishing between what a competitor could do, versus what it is likely to do. For the CI practitioner, this is an extremely valuable distinction. A shopping list of possibilities isn’t really actionable as there are too many ‘possibilities’ for any manager to plan for. What’s needed is a way to screen the ‘possible’ actions and create a short list of what’s actually likely to happen. This is where understanding the culture of a company and the character of it’s leaders provides a useful sorting mechanism. And this is why the Mindshift’s course on competitor profiling is probably one of my favourite courses.
So how does it work?
Tags: competitor analysis, Factiva, Mindshifts, Myers-Briggs, Porter, profiling
