Does this look like anything at all?
How about this?
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?