APQC SURVEY RESULTS
2010 “Voice of the Customer”
APQC, a nonprofit best practices research organization, in conjunction with the SCIP society, conducted a short online “voice of the customer” survey to understand the key challenges and issues facing today’s competitive intelligence, business intelligence and market intelligence professionals. The following is a report of the results, created for survey respondents. Please note that the confidentiality of individual responses and the privacy of individual data are protected by APQC’s Benchmarking Code of Conduct.
SURVEY OVERVIEW
One hundred twenty-two professionals completed the cross-industry survey during June and July 2010. Figure 1 illustrates the organizational size of survey participants. The majority of the respondents (81 percent) work in the United States. Sixty-three percent of the respondents were at the vice president, director, or manager level, and over a third of survey respondents indicated that they are
practitioners of competitive intelligence. Sample survey respondent titles included business information and intelligence; competitive information and intelligence; information scientist or specialist; international business; knowledge management; market analyst, intelligence, and research; research analyst/officer or research and development; and strategy and intelligence or strategic adviser. At the majority of respondent organizations (87 percent), fewer than 10 individuals are formally involved in CI activities; 22 percent of survey respondents reported that only one individual at the organization is formally involved in CI activities (Figure 2).
SUMMARY OF SURVEY RESULTS
Potential Research Topics
Survey respondents were asked how likely they would be to participate in a collaborative benchmarking study on a number of potential study topics. The results show that “competitive intelligence as a change agent,” closely followed by “executive’s view of competitive intelligence” and “competitive intelligence and social networking tools” are the top potential benchmarking study topics (Figure 3).
Figure 3
Key Challenges
Survey respondents indicated a variety of key challenges this year in gathering, mining, and implementing actionable competitive intelligence, as summarized in Table 1.
Table 1: Key Challenges
Strategy/External Environment Challenges
- Current economic downturn
- The impact of globalization and the threat from global competitors
- Competitor innovation and product changes
- Changes in competitive landscape/increased competition/mergers and acquisitions/industry consolidation
- Increasing number of industries, markets, and competitors to analyze
- Internal growth and changes in internal business model/organizational restructuring
- Misdirected focus of CI (focus on a competitor’s product line rather than competitive business strategy)
- Changes in legislation (example: financial and health care reform)/keeping up with industry change and regulation
People/Function Structure Challenges
- Developing and establishing the CI function/determining the scope of the CI function/defining CI roles and responsibilities
- Determining ownership of competitive intelligence and establishing enterprise-wide consistency in process
- Coordination of CI activities/decentralization of CI/globalization of CI services
- Aligning CI function with organizational strategic plan and vision/creating an integrated intelligence function
- Developing the competencies needed (example: problem-solving skills) in CI analysts
- Gathering and integrating information from other functions (example: sales, innovation, organizational strategy, portfolio management)
- Determining the right mix of strategic versus tactical assignments
- Stakeholder management/managing the expectations of internal clients and/or customers/perception of CI
- CI resource constraints (people, time, budget, etc.)/prioritization of projects
Process/Data/Analysis Challenges
- Establishing internal global data collection processes
- Aligning CI products, processes, and communications to best meet the needs/expectations of internal clients
- Gathering, analyzing, and creating competitive intelligence/gathering technical and R&D intelligence
- Information management and tacit knowledge capture and sharing
- Keeping up with multiple data sources, identifying new data sources, and providing value-added insight and data analysis/managing large amounts of unstructured data
- Managing ad hoc requests for CI
- Internet aggregation versus competitive intelligence
- Data quality issues
- Intelligence communication and dissemination/confidentiality issues
- Teaching the business how to best utilize the CI function and associated intelligence/informing internal clients and customers/communicating the value of CI to leadership and internal clients
- Proving ROI of CI to senior leadership and integrating CI into leadership decision making
Technology Challenges
- New or next-generation technologies/predicting disruptive technologies
- Shifting from historical competitive analysis to predictive competitive intelligence
- Identifying and accessing global information sources
- Usage of social media and collaboration technologies/mining data from these technologies
While the challenges and interests of intelligence professionals cross a broad spectrum, the survey responses indicate some key themes:
1. Competitive intelligence professionals, like others in key corporate functions today, are challenged to do more with less in this economy. They need to make the most effective use of their very limited time, they need to do a better job of prioritizing many competing demands and requests, and they have great need for effective tools, technologies, and templates that can help make their jobs easier, more efficient, and impactful.
2. Intelligence professionals are challenged by how to gather, synthesize, mine, and interpret volumes of constantly shifting information (including rapid changes in the industry, market, and competitive and legislative landscape) and
translate it into actionable intelligence.
3. Intelligence professionals need to understand the most effective role and responsibility of CI in the business, how to
link and align the CI function with organizational strategy and decision making, and, ultimately, how to
continuously demonstrate the tremendous strategic value of CI within the organization.
PARTICIPATE IN THE NEW COLLABORATIVE BENCHMARKING STUDY
For more information on the proposed collaborative benchmarking study, to secure your spot, and/or to contribute to the study scope and help shape the study, please contact APQC Program Manager Rachele Williams at
rwilliams@apqc.org or at 800-776-9676, extension 4697.
ABOUT APQC
For over 30 years, APQC has been on the leading edge of improving performance and fostering innovation around the world. APQC works with organizations across all industries to find practical, cost-effective solutions to drive productivity and quality improvement. APQC is a member-based nonprofit
currently serving more than 500 organizations in
all sectors of business, education, and
government. APQC follows a proven, four-phased
collaborative benchmarking methodology to
uncover best practices, guided by our
Benchmarking Code of Conduct
to ensure effective and ethical benchmarking. More about the benefits and deliverables of our collaborative benchmarking methodology can be found online at
http://ww.apqc.org/how-best-practice-research-works.
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