Varsha Chitale's Blog Posts Tagged 'intelligence' (21)

It is people who create effective relationships…or destroy them. And this certainly holds true for research offshoring partnerships. No doubt research offshoring relationships need to have robust institutional and process frameworks at their base. You need a comprehensive contract, service level agreements (SLAs), a defined workflow, processes for…

The world is shrinking, but the business environment of an organization is expanding due to globalization on the one hand and convergence in technologies on the other. How are organizations structuring their market intelligence functions to meet this challenge?

ValueNotes is conducting a short survey to understand the current trends in how organizations manage their market intelligence activities.

We will appreciate your participation in this survey, and request 10-15 minutes…

Customer is King – the raison d'être of every business. It is therefore imperative for all businesses to listen to their customers.

Customer loyalty in particular is of immense value to any company. High customer loyalty indicates that your company is doing a key part of its job right. It also means that you have to try less…

One of the biggest challenges for competitive intelligence (CI) analysts in India is the lack of adequate documentation and statistics. Real estate is among the least documented sectors in India. But a new legislation in the pipeline could change this...

Among the many pending legislations, is the draft Real Estate Regulation and Development Bill, 2013, which is aimed at bringing greater transparency and protection of customers’ interests.

The Bill will require all developers…

Continuous product innovation is critical for growth and success, particularly when industry growth is flat and competition is intensifying. But innovation also has risks attached to it – the risk that after investing in its development, customers will not warm up to the new product/service.

Competitive intelligence can help organisations reduce the costs and risks...

Read…

In most companies in India, competitive intelligence is not primarily done by CI professionals. Many functions are interested in competitive intelligence. Sales, marketing, strategy, product development, are the common ones. But finance, HR , procurement and others also need it. They all generally gather competitive information as part of their regular functional roles .

The users of the intelligence (and analysis) are heads of these functions, business heads, and of…

Competitive Intelligence (CI) plays a critical role in formulating an organisation’s business strategy. It can make the difference between winning and losing. However, CI can only live up to this expectation, if it addresses the right questions. Right answers to wrong questions, will be wrong for the organization. What questions should the organization ask in order to win? The answer to this requires clear logical thinking on the part of both, the decision-makers who will use the…

CI teams cannot be efficient, effective and successful without a buy-in from their co-workers at all levels – senior, middle and junior. CI teams face a dual challenge in terms of getting an internal buy-in within an organization.

First, they need to show a good ROI to the senior management in order to justify their very existence. Unless senior management perceives their value in helping the company meet its business objectives, they will a) not be consulted b) not be respected c)…

Examples of competitive intelligence failures and blind spots are cited to emphasize the importance and value of CI to an organization. A recent one is the failure of Blockbuster to see opportunity to take its business online – a blunder that cost it its very existence. In India one of the oft quoted example is that of  HLL and Nirma in the 1980s. There are, of course,  many others…

These companies did not have incompetent senior management. They were large companies with deep…

I understand that competitive intelligence is important. But why are competitive intelligence needs always urgent?  Most companies that approach us for intelligence want it in a tearing hurry.

That some kinds of tactical intelligence is often required immediately is understandable. Strategic intelligence, on the other hand is associated with long term decisions.....

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“Can you do research and tell me what my key intelligence topic should be?” was a request from a market intelligence analyst to us recently. What he was actually saying, is that he needs pointers on what trends or developments will be relevant to his company going forward, so that he can focus on them and prepare for them now. He wants to identify relevant “weak signals”.

All new trends/ patterns/ macro changes in  technologies, society, economy, etc. start with small shifts in…

This is the season for forecasting – looking at what the new year might bring… Not to be left behind, here are my two bits on what 2012 will bring for competitive intelligence practitioners in India.

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Treating a patient for the wrong ailment will not make the patient better, but may actually harm him. This is as true for an organization as for the human body.

Strategy formulation (and planning) is undertaken at least one a year in most organizations; and more often than that in some organizations.  Strategies are devised for navigating obstacles and challenges to reach the desired business objectives/ goals. However, if the key obstacles and challenges are wrongly identified, how…

Have you talked to a stranger today? Yes, I know what Little Red Riding Hood’s mother said, but if you are a competitive intelligence analyst, you are not doing a good job if you haven’t!

Competitive intelligence is all about gaining competitive advantage (for your organization). For doing this, you have to be doing something different from what your competitors are doing.…

On the SCIP linkedin group I recently came across a survey to identify the education and career moves that can lead a person into the competitive intelligence discipline.  It was most interesting to note that many of the competitive intelligence practitioners, even in countries more “CI mature” than India, got into their role by accident!

Competitive intelligence in India is a very new discipline. There are few educational courses that lead to a career in CI.…

India’s proposed National Manufacturing Policy (NMP) has ambitious objectives of creating employment for  100 million people and taking the share of manufacturing in India from the current 16% to 25% by 2022.

Competitive intelligence is critical for achieving this objective! Several successful economies such as South Korea, China, Taiwan and Brazil have used competitive intelligence for achieving their economic objectives. Hopefully the Indian implementers who will deal with the “how…

Competitive intelligence can be likened to an insurance policy for a company – it helps mitigate risks arising from developments in the external environment by providing timely warnings.

Thanks to heightened global economic uncertainties, the CI  insurance premiums have been rising sharply. Increased risks have also changed the way companies strategise.

What this means for competitive intelligence is that companies will now need to......…

All of us have received gifts at some time or the other – on birthdays perhaps? All gifts are fun to open, but once in a while we have received something that was exactly what we wanted – the perfect gift. And that gift stood above all others – how could the giver possibly have known exactly want we wanted?

Competitive intelligence is that perfect gift!

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Small businesses have limited resources at their disposal and need to figure out ways to do CI on small budgets. In…

Most companies want to be and claim to be on the right side of the fine line that demarcates ethical CI from low life espionage. Only, different people and companies draw lines at different places.

Let’s first distinguish between personal and corporate ethical lines. My friend works with the competition. Is it OK if he talks to me about his company when he has had a beer too many, and I share that information internally in my organisation? This lies in the personal space – am I…