New Technology for CI - What's Your Favorite?

[Kieran Michael Brown]

What other types of new technology, especially "web 2.0" tools, do you find valuable? I'm thinking of tools like technorati, del.icoi.us and Linkedin and custom RSS feeds. I suppose you could include the whole pantheon of Google apps in there as well. You might also include high end tools like what Anderson Analytics offers.

I'm interested in hearing how other people have adapted some of these great gadgets for CI purposes.

[Arik Johnson]

So, I tried to add a page about Disruptive Technology, essentially just pulling it out of Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology - but it came out pretty wacky. Since this is still in beta and the documentation says it's raw html output I think a word processor might be editor of first resort before a copy/paste operation to get it into the text field and saved online.

[Kieran Michael Brown]

Not to cut off the wiki discussion, but another cool web 2.0 tool I've been using is docstoc.

Here you can up and download all kinds of document samples, spreadsheets, powerpoints, word and pdf, et al., and not only is it a good resource for, say sample business plans, you'd be surprised what people actually upload thinking it has no intelligence value ;)

[Andreas Romppel]

Hi there - what about competitious.com and rivalmap.com? Did anyone of you check those sites already? They seem to be really Web2.0-ish. I was surprised how easy it is to start projects and to add sources and information. Security is certainly an issue with all online applications, but I think it's a good starting point - at least for smaller companies with no real experience in CI. I covered them in a few posts my blog on www.konkurrenzanalyse.biz/blog (for those of you who read German).

Another aspect is the usage of web 2.0 techniques not only as a tool for processing CI but also as a great source of new data, information bits and especially potential contacts. Maybe we have to cover that in a second thread.

By the way, Arik - great job of setting up this forum and the discussion...

Greetings from Germany - Andreas

[Arik Johnson]

Great - I've heard of both sites - Competitious and Rivalmap that is - but not sure of their scope. It seems lately the whole term "competitive intelligence" has become associated with SEO (search engine optimization) tools and techniques and figured they were both oriented there, but maybe not eh?

By the way, feel free to drop your blog's RSS feed onto your profile page here for indexing - German or not, I'm sure many would find your thoughts very compelling (I believe we can turn on text translation from Google's API here too).

- Arik

[Andreas Romppel]

Thanks for the hint - I'm still checking out the capabilities of this platform... :-)

[Avner Barnea]

Hi - I have come across with a CI professional who is using competitious and is quite happy. It is one of the tools she is using. Regards, Avner , Israel

[Chris Hote]

I have been exposed to wikis during my last assignment at a 2500p corporation and I found it highly efficient for several reasons:
- Wiki allows to take structured notes during meetings and have them shared instantaneously with remote persons. This situation greatly improved communication as anyone can immediately comment what was written down in the wiki page disregarding the quality of communication between participants. No more space for false interpretation.

- Wiki allows concurrent accesses facilitating information exchange. This feature allows to save a great deal of emails.

- Starting a Wiki page is easy and quick, and therefore may be used for many purposes, from informal discussions to more elaborate meetings.

In that corporation, Wikis are the main pilars of all communications. Each meeting room only needs a computer with an access to the corporation intranet. When notes are captured in the Wiki they are viewed by any participants to the meeting whether they are in the room or remotely located (no WebEx needed).

Wiki keeps track of history and thus it might not be the best idea to use Wiki for discussing legal matters unless anything captured in the Wiki is totally verifiable and ethical.

[Jens Thieme]

For information gathering, news clippings, commenting and as a reporitory for market studies, newsletters and other subscribed sources we use GIA's web based Plaza application.

Recent internal survey results high lights (marketing audience):
97% users find the tool invaluable to their daily routines
83% ease of use satisfaction
82% value in use satisfaction

Theoretical monetized productivity gain for 400 active users CHF 1.5mio/a.

Currently we are looking into ecompetitors.com and Matrix, undecided yet.

[Kieran Michael Brown]

Interesting article in the Globe and Mail about the backlash against Google's SaaS offerings here. The gist of it is, that as a USA company, Google is subject to investigative searches that break foreign privacy protection laws.

I wonder if any current CI tools might have the same vulnerability?

[August Jackson]

A Wiki Is Like A Room And Other Lessons Learned From 15 Wiki-based,...

This paper outlines the lessons learned from using a web-based collaborative tool, commonly referred to as a “wiki”, to create custom intelligence products for decisionmakers in national security, law enforcement and business. While I consider the conclusions in this paper tentative, almost exploratory, in nature, they are based on a considerable body of evidence. Over the last year, student-analysts at Mercyhurst College have used wikis to produce 15 large scale estimative products for real world decisionmakers (or intelligence professionals who support real-world decisionmakers). Despite these analysts' experience with traditional methods of producing intelligence analysis (or perhaps because of it), they came to overwhelmingly prefer to use wikis to produce intelligence. In addition, all decisionmakers who sponsored the 15 projects indicated that they were satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of the products they received and all indicated that they would be willing to receive products in a wiki format again (with the majority expressing an outright preference for the wiki format).

[Avner Barnea]

One of the ajor problems with wiki in the firm's website is it has a lot of non relevant information as it is not really controled. Another problem is building contexts among various peices of information already exist in the blog. It is limited and value of the information and there is no intelligence available.
Avner

[V. Shuman]

I work at the corporate level for a 5-company group, and have been working to find smart, low cost/free CI solutions that will allow us to both collect and share information globally (and easily!) within and among firms. One tool that has proven useful is Diigo - they have been slowly but surely increasing their functionality over the last 18 months or so and it's proving to be a handy way to build a corporate infobase on topics of interest. It's still a bit tough to extract and publish collections of information without a lot of post processing, however. Has any one else used Diigo and if so, how do you find that it compares with alternatives?