Expert User Series, Part 1 — Written by Kelly See, Knowledge Analyst at Ericsson
The work of competitive intelligence (CI) depends largely on insights from external sources — market research, company press releases, and company financial statements, to name a few.
Competitive intelligence software makes the work of storing and finding external materials much easier. But what about the internal analysis produced by a company’s CI professionals?
Is your company sharing those internal insights in a way that allows them to be easily found and reused?
Why Share Internal Competitive Intelligence Insights?
A CI platform like Intelligence2day® can be used to share internal business and competitive intelligence material, such as competitor profiles, win-loss analyses, and battlecards.
By combining those internal sources, which we call “assets,” with external reports and news in the system, you have a powerful tool allowing your users to save time by:
- only searching one place for both external and internal resources, and
- reusing insights created by other teams in the organization.
How to Share Internal Competitive Intelligence Assets
Here are a few ways that you can share CI assets internally.
Use Profiles
The Profile feature within Intelligence2day® provides a simple way to share internal assets.
Profiles are custom templates that define the information that users should provide when publishing. The Profile becomes a form to be completed. Not only can you include text fields in your Profile template, but you can have fields for URLs and uploading attachments.
By creating a profile for internal assets, you can guide contributors through the publishing process and make sure they add not only key information such as a title and summary, but also upload a file or link, and provide additional details (such as target audience or key industries). Remind users that the more information they provide about their asset, the easier it is for their colleagues to find it.
Think of the Profile like a record in a database – by creating a record for their internal asset, the author tells others about the material. The most powerful thing about the profile is that, once published, it becomes findable in search alongside the other resources in the system.
Tip: Try to balance the number of fields in the Profile with the amount of information needed about the asset and the amount of time your teams are willing to spend on the publishing process. More fields mean more information about the asset; however, users may get discouraged and view more fields as more work.
Create Internal Topics
In order to better organize the internal insights that are added to the system, use Intelligence2day®’s Topics to categorize them.
You can create Topics for each unit or team, which can be used to tag their profiles. Team- or unit-based topics allow users to easily search for assets by team and you can also easily pull those assets into a Team Dashboard.
Tip: Create Topics for each of the company’s business units, as well as for individual teams that are publishing into the system. Within the individual teams, you can also create sub-topics for the type of deliverable.
Getting Started
Thinking about how your company can get started sharing internal intelligence? Here are some ideas.
- Run a Pilot
Consider running a pilot with one team that is interested in capturing and sharing their assets.
We started with a team from one business area that wanted to bring their competitive intelligence insights together into one place. We trained them on how to add their assets into the system and created a dashboard for the team where they could easily find those assets. Based on feedback from the team, we went through four iterations of the dashboard, as well as improved the process for adding material into the system.
The benefits of a pilot:
- The number of assets published will be manageable.
- You can work out any challenges before expanding your program.
- The pilot team can provide feedback on the process of adding assets so that you can improve as you go along.
- Find More Teams to Participate
After a successful pilot, spread the word about your program to other CI teams in your organization. Let them know how you can help them easily share their internal intelligence assets.
- Market the Successes
Promote the positive outcomes experienced by your pilot team and others. Some ideas to publicize your successes include:
- Run training sessions featuring dashboards and assets currently in the system to show what’s possible and how other teams can benefit.
- Send out newsletters (using Intelligence2day®) to promote your initiative and highlight internal assets.
- Recognize the top sharers on a regular basis (through newsletters, banners on the front page of your portal, or internal networking platforms).
Challenges
The process laid out above makes it seem easy. However, as we all know, there will be challenges along the way. What challenges might you encounter?
From my experience, here are the most frequent challenges that we have:
- Time — Users say they don’t have time to share their insights.
- Habit — Users don’t want to learn new ways of working.
- Resistance to sharing — Users hold on to their knowledge so that they become the go-to expert.
I do not have magic answers to address these challenges, but I do have some suggestions in the following section.
Learnings
Over the past four years, I have worked with competitive intelligence teams to help them share their intelligence assets in a centralized way.
Here are some of my learnings for how to be successful when developing a knowledge management initiative for competitive intelligence assets:
Get Management Support
- Directives from management requiring internal knowledge sharing can be extremely helpful. Management support gives credibility to your efforts, and when more people share, more people benefit. It becomes a virtuous circle encouraging the continual sharing of insights.
- Encourage management to lead by example and use your tool to share too.
Use Your Champions
- Capture testimonials from individuals and teams when they are able to re-use internal assets – how did it benefit them? Did it save them time? Did they find something useful that they didn’t know existed? Then tell those stories.
- I recently encountered this exact scenario. I received a request for assistance researching a specific topic. In addition to pointing out the external sources that could help, I directed the user to an internal report that had been published in our competitive intelligence platform by a team in a different business unit. The shared report turned out to be very helpful to them and they shared with me how much time and effort they were able to save (“hours and hours!”) by having access to the shared information.
- Examples like these are powerful evidence that internal knowledge sharing works and benefits our colleagues as well as the organization.
- Encourage your supporters to tell others about their experience and how they benefit from sharing.
Set the Example
- You — as the system administrator — can also share your knowledge. Publish information about how to use the system itself. Not only do you set an example, but you also make it simpler for others to use the system by telling them how to use it most efficiently.
Make It Easy and Then Make it Easier
- Through trial and error, continuously work to improve the process of adding internal assets. Listen to feedback, both positive and negative.
- Even when you as the portal administrator think it’s fast and easy to add assets, your users will want it to be even faster and even easier. Simplify the process as much as possible.
For example, we received feedback that the profile we created for adding competitive intelligence material to the system was too long. We used that feedback to re-work the profile and focus on the most important information that needs to be shared (title, summary, document link, or attachment). We also created an alternative profile that is much shorter to encourage even the most resistant users to share.
In Conclusion
Knowledge sharing encourages knowledge reuse, which saves employees and the organization both time and effort. When starting the process to incorporate internal CI assets into your competitive intelligence portal, consider how to make the process of publishing assets as easy as possible for your users.
Be open to feedback and willing to evolve and improve over time. And share the successes along the way.
