There are many things to do to be successful in a competitive intelligence (CI) function. There are some things that will likely doom an effort. When working in CI it is important to understand  both perspectives. That is, there are things to ensure and things to avoid.

Here is my list of things to do to “doom” a competitive intelligence effort. It behooves a person involved to work to avoid these circumstances if they want to be successful.

• Bury it in the organization – This is a failure indication because it means that the CI likely has little access to management and what they are thinking. Sometimes this happens when the CI is seen primarily as a sales and marketing tool rather than as a strategy enabler.

• Concentrate on tactical questions – A CI function gets few chances to establish its value. Given limited resources and time, tactical issues can consume all of the available capacity. This will limit the strategic impact of the CI and be of less value to those that need to sponsor the effort.

• Highly filter information in both directions – It is difficult to provide perfect information or anticipate all that is needed. Excessive filtering means that there is little ongoing calibration between CI people and management. Without calibration, it is likely that the CI effort will diverge from what is most important to management.

• Focus on undifferentiated information – It is easy to accumulate information. It is harder to provide insight that is useful. As the quantity of information increases and the insight decreases, the value of CI is lessened.

• Staff with people that have little credibility in the organization – People trust people. At least, they trust certain people. The CI function must be trusted and valued for their insights. Without that credibility, information, reports and analyses will be ignored.

• Avoid measuring its value – At the end of the day, competitive intelligence is an overhead function. Its value will always be debated and the function will be subject to elimination without measurement of its impact. A profession CI person will regularly be seeking quantitative and qualitative feedback from management about the impact of their effort.

See my presentation on Competitive Intelligence Lessons at http://tinyurl.com/dbuyb7.