SharePoint and Competitive Intelligence

[Megan]

I am knee deep in SP deployment and would love to hear how you are using SP2010 as your KM /CI solution. What works? What doesn't? How do your users want to use this tool for CI? What are your tools and tips?

[Chris Hote]

@Megan: Conceptually and as suggested, once may say SP is not a CI system per se and may be used as an information/knowledge sharing platform. In that context, a CI tool can integrate with SP2010 in two ways:

1 - To feed SP2010 portals with intelligence insights and for the benefit of non intelligence professionals

2 - To capture human intelligence with SP2010 so that the CI tool users can elaborate on those field intel items.

 

Below are typical scenario, CI tools and SP2010 may be integrated, sorted by increasing added-value.

 

For free:
You can push RSS feeds into SharePoint (manual adding of particular RSS feeds)

For free and with some customization work:
You can push alerts into SharePoint through a combination of HTML2RSS, YahooPipes, GoogleAlerts tools.

For free and with some IT work (XML post-processing and web-parts technologies):
You can push alerts onto different SP2010 portals using web-parts

Fee-based:
You can have CI tools providing charts, dashboards, company profile, and/or selected alerts being pushed to SharePoint portals (C-levels, marketing & communication, strategy, Sales).
Some CI tools also provide reversed workflow where human intelligence is input by users (e.g.: Sales rep, product managers) within SharePoint and poured back to intelligence professionals with the CI tool.