Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

Here are some clarifications.

“Senior management” means, to me, someone that has funding authority to openly support and apply competitive intelligence regularly in an organization. For some organization, this might be someone at a director level. For other organizations, this is a C suite person.

A quantitative CI ROI is often very difficult to calculate. My guess is that your customers formulated a qualitative CI ROI based on the attributes that you describe as important.

We are in complete agreement about CI helping make better decisions. That is the fundamental support role for CI, I believe.

Great to see you in Washington. See you soon in Richardson if our schedules can be aligned.

You write such great provocative posts! So I’ll provoke back. I don’t think it’s necessary that CI is supported by senior management as there are a whole host of other people in the company who use CI in their jobs much more often and have more need and appreciation for it: sales, marketing, product developers, R&D…and they often will fund it.

I have found that CI is a support function so I often don’t target a company’s leadership, since many are too visionary to spend as much time in CI. And is that a bad thing! I don’t think so. But these other functional areas find CI useful and it’s part of what they have to do to keep the company competitive (and their jobs)!

This whole measurement ROI stuff is a recurring theme in CI. Ironically the companies I worked for didn’t care about ROI. They care about responsiveness, being attuned to what was happening in the marketplace more than measuring us as though we were in sales or something! We are a support position. CI will never pay for itself like a line function. And I don’t think it should! So much of what we do helps company make better decisions, for example to go with a new product or partner or not to.

OK now for where measurement is easier: win loss analysis is the easiest way to get measurement although this is the unsexy tactical CI which people often put down. Many companies don’t even really do win loss since they’re afraid of what they might learn and they don’t have the guts to change their behavior due to their paralytic culture, and/or politics! It’s usually not because they can’t afford to financially conduct win loss.

Tom…keep up your sharing!