SCORECARD: Give yourself one point for every “true” response. The higher your score, the more effective your competitive intelligence work will be.
My company…
1. Has assigned an employee and a sufficient budget to collect and analyze competitive intelligence.
2. Synthesizes judgments, opinions, hypotheses, predictions and recommendations out of the information it gathers.
3. Monitors the Internet for misinformation that is injurious to the company’s reputation.
4. Focuses its intelligence-gathering on future-oriented information from a well-developed network of contacts rather than just historical information from secondary sources.
5. Distributes its knowledge selectively within the company — say, by e-mail, intranet or internal blogs.
6. Prevents wasting money on redundant intelligence-gathering activities across multiple departments by centralizing the process.
7. Concentrates its CI efforts on finding and analyzing revenue and profit growth opportunities that are of high interest to management.
8. Assembles its senior executives regularly to discuss their intelligence needs and how the company can improve its intelligence processes.
9. Applies intelligence-gathering to all critical business functions, such as sales, marketing and product development.
10. Not only watches its competitors but also keeps a close eye on broader market issues, such as regulatory change and technology trends.
