First, the bane …

In the Lord of the Rings story, the fellowship travels great distances and through many adventures trying to accomplish their mission. One of my favorite parts of the story is when they must travel through Moria, an underground dwarve colony and site of their great mines. Led by Durin, the dwarves settled “under the mountain” and began to build, explore and mine the riches that they found there. What they did not know (until it was too late) was the danger that dwelt in the depths. A Balrog. Durin’s Bane. The unspeakable terror that threatened them all. And it was coming for them.

A little dramatic, I suppose, but it is worth recognizing similar banes that befall the competitive intelligence community. That is, the “terrors” that hold the potential to derail all that we know to be true and worthwhile and to make our mission difficult, if not impossible. It is not hard to identify these things. It is only hard for us, collectively, to overcome them.

Here are the five banes that I think are most troublesome.

1. Missing the deep connection with senior management. I regularly run surveys of competitive intelligence professionals. (Take my latest survey here.) In most of the surveys I ask a variant of the question, “how well do you work with or get support from senior management?” This question usually gets the most negative responses (i.e., this is a big problem). Anecdotally, I hear all the time that making connections (e.g., relationships, meaningful dialogs, clear commissions) with sponsors is extraordinarily difficult for many. Is it any wonder that competitive intelligence projects often fail when these connections are missing?
2. Missing competency measures for professionals. Quick question – “Who is the best competitive intelligence professional that you know (excepting yourself, of course)?” Did a name come to mind? Here is a meta-question. How would know who is the best? We do not hand out merit badges, hold competitions or certify outcomes. So, how do you or I know who is the best, how we relate to that standard and if we are improving? The bottom line is that it is hard for us to know any of those things using objective measures. As a result, we all live in the mushy world of marketing perceptions. Why is that trouble? See my first point.
3. Missing meaningful measures of success. After the missing link with senior management, the next most problematic area for many competitive intelligence professionals is the ineffective representation of value for competitive intelligence. While the nirvana might be to be able to truthfully say something like, “as a result of our CI work, revenues and profits increased by x% and costs decreased by y%,” sadly many CI projects end with little linkage between effort and outcomes. This, of course, is a long-term prescription for extinction of the function. A short-term ROI perspective, cleanly and convincingly expressed, drives senior management. When we muddle through, or worse, avoid a CI value description, it signals to management that CI is an optional function. When cost reductions are important, they eliminate optional functions.
4. Missing shared problem-solving vehicles. Notwithstanding some of the fine CI communities that exist, there seems to be little shared problem-solving within the community. Ascribe that to busyness, diverging agendas, confidentiality requirements or disinterest – the net effect is that that many practitioners exist on virtual islands. That means that each person is left to his or her own problem-solving patterns and solutions. This is great for self-reliance development but not so good for advancing a discipline.  The cumulative impact is that we grow much slower as a community, develop fewer iconic figures recognizable outside the narrow CI population and poorly link research to practical application. (My modest attempt to help with this problem is my new website for Competitive Intelligence Case studies at www.cicases.com.)
5. Missing clear definition of CI from others. This recurring problem has significant ramifications. The problem is not so much that two CI professionals differ over the nuances in a competitive intelligence definition. No, the problem is how others outside of CI define competitive intelligence. The bottom line is that they do not do a good job and we, inside the industry, suffer because of that. The definitions range from those that are plainly wrong (“it’s corporate espionage”), subtly misleading (“it’s no different from market research”) to unhelpfully narrow (“it’s all about competitors” ). Notice how much time we spend responding to or correcting such misguided opinions and then imagine if we could spent similar energy advancing our skills or collaboration instead. The lack of an externally recognized definition saps our time and energy from more productive pursuits.

There are problems to be sure. But, what about competitive intelligence boons?

Here are three positive truths to remember.

1. Competitive intelligence has always been important and always will be. From time immemorial, whenever business competition occurred, it has been helpful to know more about competitors, the environment and the ways to win. People intuitively know this to be true and examples abound where such knowledge resulted in advantages.
2. With clearly expressed value, it is not difficult to “sell” competitive intelligence. Here we can admit that many CI professionals do not sell well. We lead with techniques, software tools and search gimmicks that seem valuable (to us) but are not valuable to senior management. However, with practice and some translation skills, we can adjust our presentation to the management (i.e., customer) perspective. That works.
3. Collaboration opportunities are increasing. This is a function of two large things. First, the tools and mechanisms available through the Internet make it easy to connect to professionals around the world. Second, there is (IMHO) an increasing sense that we need each other to represent better our specialty and to advance a common agenda of increased value. There is nothing like a recession to spur people to action.

The Balrog doomed Durin. It was his bane. Later, if you know the story, Gandalf overcame the Balrog after a great struggle. The good triumphed over the evil.

We can certainly rectify personally and collectively the banes of competitive intelligence. In part, we do this by remembering all that is right about the profession and its aims.

What do you think?