Intelcollab Needs Your Insight! What Business Questions Do You Believe Are Most Relevant for CI?

[August Jackson]

My fellow CI Ning community members, the IntelCollab is seeking your insight!  What business questions, problems and decisions do you believe competitive intelligence is best able to address?

The IntelCollab is in the very early stages of creating a wiki at https://intelcollab.get-traction.com.  To make the site relevant to a wide audience we have chosen initially to organize the site according to business issues (questions, problems, decisions).  To that end we've put together an initial set of issues (see below).  Please help us make sure this list as comprehensive as possible.

What other business issues or questions have you been asked in your competitive intelligence career?  What CI methods and techniques did you apply to inform the decision-making behind this business issue?  Please comment on this discussion.  You may also want to join us on our weekly web conference next Friday (August 20 at 10h30 EDT, details forthcoming).

• Increasing Sales in Competitive Markets
• Predicting competitor moves
• Keeping executives informed
• Predicting Industry Change
• Resource Allocation
• Strategy
• Deciding which new products to launch
• Deciding how to allocate annual and long term investments
• Benchmarking corporate and operational performance
• Understanding likely competitor pricing and positioning in proposal bid
• Streamlining an existing product portfolio
• Becoming strategic partner to customers
• Improving sales team effectiveness in complex solution sales
• Pipeline Technology Tracking and Analysis
• Competitor strategy analysis
• Industry strategy analysis
• Organization analysis and productivity analysis
• Process analysis
• Competitive analysis of business opportunities
• Plan capital investments
• Capacity & sizing decisions
• Anticipate needed skills and capabilities

[Ellen Naylor]

I like this list, August. Strategically I have been asked to predict potential acquisitions, mergers and divestitures, often achieved through executive personality assessment/motivation profiles and the usual tracking. Will be on the call this Friday...home at last!