25 May 10 CI: Working without precision

Does this look like anything at all?

Does this look like anything at all?

How about this?

How about this?

Figured it out?

Figured it out?

Notice that you don’t need to have every piece in place to be pretty certain that it’s a dog you are looking at!

Got the connection with competitive intelligence? Picking out and piecing together relevant bits of information on the business environment from the noisy information overload around,  is what CI practitioners must do. But you don’t need every little last bit of data to see what is going on in your business environment. Many times it is simply not possible to get each and every data point and most often it is not cost effective to try to do so.

The trick is to know:

  • What pieces do I need?
  • Why do I need them?
  • How do I find them?
  • How do I put them together?
  • How many and which ones are enough?
  • How much will it cost to get them?
  • How much will it cost to not get them?

Simple, isn’t it? Is it?

Varsha Chitale

Varsha led the competitive intelligence practice at ValueNotes. As part of her drive to educate India Inc. on the merits of competitive intelligence, she often conducted webinars and seminars on CI for senior executives of Indian companies.

3 Comments
  • antonio
    Posted at 18:03h, 24 June Reply

    excelent Varsha
    A good example what is CI and i´m gonna use it for all those who question me about this subject
    Thank you

  • narayanan
    Posted at 07:08h, 27 May Reply

    This is cool! But we would need to wait till we collect all the required pieces,lest we end up drawing wrong conclusions. Without the tail, “Q” would read as “O”.

    Thanks
    Narayanan

    • Varsha
      Posted at 07:45h, 29 May Reply

      Good point! Deciding what is adequate is certainly not trivial!

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