“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.

If you’re engaging expensive consultants like McKinsey and KPMG, you want to make sure you’re getting value for money. As I’ve argued in the case of engaging competitive intelligence specialists,

“To get the most value out of CI, the decision you’re engaging CI to help answer should be one that is still to be made, and not something that’s already been decided. (MinimalState 01/04/2010)

On this basis, DBCDE ‘s decision to request an implementation study, rather than a cost-benefit analysis, looks like a  smart move.  It’s a  smart use of resources – since the report addresses decisions still to be made;  and politicly astute – since there’s no chance of the report coming out with the ‘wrong’ answer. DBCDE has arguably asked the right questions in terms of making sure the NBN gets built in the way that best meets the stated policy objective.

Unfortunately, without some form of cost-benefit analysis, we’re no closer to knowing if the objectives the government are pursing are the right ones.

“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?

Firstly, these services may serve as a new source of  insights . Kaggle and Innocentive are tools that may be used to help meet an organisations intelligence needs.  Especially where access to outside expertise is beneficial, an Innocentive challenge or Kaggle prediction could prove valuable. Competitions and challenges might also be an innovative way for organisations to identify new talent in a particular field of interest.

The second  reason for  CI practitioners to pay attention to these services is the opportunity to be part of teams participating in these competitions.  Perhaps start-ups will form specifically to compete in these challenges – building teams to compete on a project by project basis? Perhaps traditional consultancies will leverage their expertise in to these new competition markets? Both these scenarios could see CI professionals being recruited to help give teams a competitive edge in these competitions.

Services such as Kaggle and Innocentive provide CI professionals with both a new tool for answering their intelligence problems, as well as a potential new source of employment.  Keeping an eye on the evolution of these services would therefore be a worthwhile activity for those with an interest in competitive intelligence.

Google search a specific domain.

Lets face it, the search capability on some sites isn’t great.  Sometimes it’s because the site is simply using a poor search engine, other times it’s because the results may have been manipulated so that certain pages (like promotions and special offers) are pushed to the top of search results. To get around this, use a Google search restricted to the web site (domain) you want to search. This can be accessed under the advanced search for Google or by entering in to the Google search  ”site:domain.com“ (replacing domain.com with the site you want to search).

Google search a specific file type

If you’re looking for pictures of someone or something, there’s images.google.com, and if video is what you’re seeking, it’s video.google.com.  But what if you’re looking for something else – like a document or slide presentation? Once again, advanced search for Google is your friend as its lets you restrict your search to a specified file type. Alternatively you can use “filetype:ext” (where ext is the extension of the file type you are after such as pdf, doc, or ppt).

The combination search

A useful trick from my experience is to combine a domain specific search with a search for a specific file type. I most frequently use this to find copies of product spec sheets and brochures, since these are often in .pdf format. But to give you some inspiration to try this out, some examples of the valuable information I’ve found using this technique include

• details of several competitors pricing ( an .xls document on a government web site);
• a competitors sales presentation for its channel partners (a .ppt on the channel partners ftp site); and
• copies of whitepapers and case studies that normally require you to provide your details to a sales person to gain access to. (a .pdf on a competitors site).

The combination of these two techniques can really help improve your search for information. But what if you’re still struggling to wade through tens of pages of search results? Or what if your search turns up too few items of interest? Stay tuned because I’ll have suggestions for solving these problems (and more tips and tricks) in subsequent smarter searching posts.

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.

1. Be clear on what decision the intelligence will influence.
Producing CI has a cost – either the opportunity cost of the time dedicated by in-house CI or real cash leaving your organisation. If you want the best bang for your CI buck, take the time to think through what decision(s) you are trying to improve by gathering competitive insights.

To get the most value out of CI, the decision you’re engaging CI to help answer should be one that is still to be made, and not something that’s already been decided.

For example, if the CEO has decided to launch a new promotional offer, collecting CI to justify that decision ex-post arguably adds little real value, even if it does allow one to tick the ‘market intelligence’ section of the business case and proceed to the next stage of development. In this situation, there’s potentially more value to be gained from using CI to improves decisions yet to be made, such as:

• What marketing message should we run? (CI could help determine what messaging competitors are using and hence what will be differentiated.)
• What media should we use? (CI may be able to advise on competitor advertising behaviour so you know if you are going to be going head-to-head or have clear space.)
• How should our sales force respond to comparisons with our competitors? (CI can gather information on the strengths and weakness of competitor products to help manage customer comparisons.)
• When should we launch the offer? (CI might be able to determine if there are particular periods where competitors will be more vulnerable.)

You can also help improve the CI process by providing some context about the decision process itself – such as who the decisions makers are (if not yourself), where the decision will be made (at a meeting? by email?) and when the decision will be made. The latter point is particularly important, and is discussed in more detail later.

2. Explain how different information and insights will help make a better decision
Once you’re clear on the decision CI needs to help make, list the information about the competition that is actually needed to make that decision. Then, next to each item, write down how this information helps to make a better decision. If you can’t be clear on how something improves the decision – strike it off the list!

The items on this list provide guidance on the essential information and topics for the CI practitioner to focus on. At the same time, understanding how different pieces of information contributes to the decision making process can help the more enterprising researcher or analyst to identify other relevant and useful information.

For a small investment of time, a list like this can help improve the likelihood the insights produced are well targeted and relevant to the decision that needs to be made. Your CI analyst or consultant will also appreciate not spending time collecting superfluous information that never gets used.

3. Get CI involved early
If you’re engaging someone to produce CI, get them involved sooner rather than later. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and things will work out. Maybe the information you’re requesting will be on hand or will be simple to produce. Maybe you can find a consultant with enough hours and resources to hit that looming deadline.

But you might not be lucky and instead find yourself having to make do with whatever superficial information can be hurriedly scraped together – or maybe nothing at all. The best way to reduce the risk of this happening is to get CI involved early on the decision making process.

CI has the potential to improve your organisations performance. Following these three simple suggestions can help improve the return from CI by ensuring that relevant information is collected in time to help solve real business problems.

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?

Create the Basic Profiles
To start with, you need a pretty good base of information about your competitor and it’s leaders. As was pointed out repeatedly during the workshop, you need to build profiles that include both ‘hard information’ (data, facts, statistics, news, time-lines) and ‘soft information’ (opinion, anecdotes, commentary, personal observation).

In my experience this is a straightforward but very time consuming process. If you don’t have an army of graduates/interns to do this work then you might want to consider subscribing to a service like Factiva to speed up your information search, or even contract a librarian/researcher to assist.

Once you have a mix of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ information, this is used to create profiles which summarise the key information about the competitor and it’s leaders.

Analyse the personality and corporate culture
A major focus of the Mindshifts course was using the information in the profiles to estimate the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) of your competitor’s leader(s). This then provides a frame of reference for predicting how they are likely to behave when faced with certain situations or decisions.

Where things took an interesting turn during the workshop was when we were introduced to the idea of using MBTI to describe the corporate culture of a company. This process involves the CI practitioner analysing the culture of the company within an MBTI style framework to determine the temperament of the competitor. (e.g. Guardian, Artisan, Rational, Idealist).

From Possibilities to Probabilities
The third step starts with analysing the competitor using Porter’s ‘Competitor Analysis’. By examining the competitors stated goals, current strategies, capabilities and management assumptions – a response profile is generated which identifies the competitors possible offensive and defensive actions. This is where a lot of ‘competitor analysis’ (including my own until now!) would have stopped – with a list of possible actions.

What makes the Mindshift’s profiling course so useful is that it teaches how to use the culture and personality profiles to narrow down the list of ‘possible’ actions into a shorter list of what the competitor is ‘probably’ going to do. This is extremely valuable to the CI practitioner as it then becomes more realistic to offer options for responding to the competitors likely actions.

Overall, I’d rate this as my favourite Mindshift’s course so far. For those interested in attending the course, keep an eye out on the “Upcoming Events” page at Mindshifts or join their mailing list.

Note: This is an edited version of an article previously published at ‘Catallaxy Files’ but lost during the great crash of ‘09.