Don't know how I missed this, but I just came across SCIP's blog called the Voice. Looks like it's going to be penned by Ken Garrison, SCIP's executive director, and his first post asks for feedback about SCIP's online initiatives. So far he's received several comments on how the organization's discussion forums can be improved. If you have feedback head on over and leave a comment.
August Jackson, he of Competitive Intelligence Podcast fame, has finished up his MBA and it looks like he's going to be using some of his newly found free time (is any time free?) to re-start his blog. That's good news for anyone interested in competitive intelligence as August is one of the more interesting practitioners in the biz to talk to. Here he writes about his efforts to incorporate RSS feeds into his blog. Welcome back August!
Dan McHugh is posting on his CI blog again and those interested in competitive intelligence should be thankful. Posts like his EDS on War-gaming are the reasons why. Apparently Dan hasn't been posting to his blog because his new gig at Microsoft has kept him a little busy. Don't you hate it when the day job gets in the way of a good blog?
Fuld's Competitive Musings has posted a pop quiz on intelligence. Visit the site and see how you do. Here's the first two questions to give you a taste:
1. How has Google upset the phone business – without even having entered that business? Which phone carrier has already reacted? What early warning signal was this carrier watching before making its announcement?
2. Which famous investor concluded a very large and a very public acquisition inside of two weeks? Which company did he buy and which types of intelligence helped him identify the acquisition? How did his action prove that competitive intelligence is a combination of experience and information – where investor experience diminishes the need for heavy doses of information, in turn speeding the decision to buy?
Kent's Imperative has a very interesting post on the issues faced by competitive intelligence professionals who blog or want to blog. From the post:
It is interesting for us to see this discussion in a commercial intelligence perspective. Those in the public sector have a far more clear set of distinctions – and enforced by far more than mere civil tort – that bound words and deed. This by necessity limits to a much greater degree the range of topics we can address in public pages, and to avoid even the appearance of impropriety one’s opinions must be even more carefully circumscribed on any matter that might be seen as leading to politicization. Intelligence practitioners must be professionally apolitical, in all aspects of their public presence – something too often forgotten in the current Beltway atmosphere.
Most organizations simply do not permit an intelligence professional to blog in public at all. Some of those efforts which are allowed to exist may only do so under a high degree of restriction. (We suppose our humble effort falls into the latter category.) In government service, there are of course alternatives on other networks for those that wish to speak more freely about matters of more direct impact to their daily working lives. (As for us, we appreciate the chance to step away from the issues of the day and examine the craft in a more holistic fashion – but this is not for everyone.) But this is not the first time we have looked to this subject.
There's also a link to August Jackson's musings on the subject.
According to the Brand Killer Robots blog there's a dispute on Wikipedia about the definition of 'agent provocateur':
Commercial intelligence analysts and civil servants have clashed over the definition of 'Agent Provocateur' on Wikipedia. Government sources favour the traditional James Bond 007 style of definition, where commercial analysts are putting forward the new definition below.
An agent provocateur is a person assigned to provoke the awakening of a new order within a group. This assignment can be either covert or overt and predominately represents the interests of others, outside the group.
Agent provocateurs can be found in the intelligence services, business management, politics and the media.
Fuld's blog is a good one and there are three posts I just perused that I think you'll find interesting. I've listed them below with links and the introductory paragraphs so you can get a taste:
$10 Billion on Corporate Spying? Not Exactly!
A couple of weeks ago a reporter from a major business magazine contacted me with questions concerning spying accusations leveled at Hewlett Packard. In the course of our discussion, he asked me, “How much do companies spend on legitimate competitive intelligence efforts?”
I’ve heard the question before, but now, for the first time, I had a realistic answer to the question.
Fuld & Co. recently completed the first-ever global CI benchmarking study (From Stick Fetchers to World Class)
that polled companies for their CI budgets, among other topics. By
comparing the survey’s findings, industry by industry, with that of the
Fortune 1,000 listings, we were able to reasonably estimate overall CI
spending for this class of companies in the United States.
Two entrepreneurs and their disruptive visions for The Wall Street Journal
Irony of ironies, Brad Greenspan, a co-founder of MySpace, whom Rupert Murdoch bought out a couple of years ago, has reportedly also placed a bid for Dow Jones. He wants this prize for himself and sees a somewhat different future in it than does Mr. Murdoch.
But the visions of Murdoch and Greenspan share a common theme.
Rupert Murdoch’s move to buy
Dow Jones and its flagship, Wall Street Journal, is a natural extension
of his long-time approach: Content, content, content…it’s all about
content (or at least content that can attract advertising).
Selective Memories: How We Think About Competitors
Label this a small thought. It has to do with what we remember and how we color the information we do recall.
I recently read an article in the business section of my paper that discusses how people think about discount pricing. According to a New York Times article, a study in The Journal of Marketing observes that if a manufacturer offers a discount program and states the discount in terms of absolute dollars (or whatever currency), the consumer is likely to remember that discount and may also consider it a permanent price drop. That is, the consumer will expect from here on forward that you will sell that product at the discounted price. This same study compares the experience when a producer offers the product at “45% off,” for example. Apparently the specific discount does not stick when it’s stated in percentage terms. This producer has a better shot at raising prices without the customer rejecting the higher price.
Dan McHugh's CI blog looks to be relatively new and if his first few posts are any indication it's going to be a good one. Check out his posts The Three A's of Competitive Intelligence - Analysis and RSS - CI Professional's best friend? for a taste.
I just stumbled across Arthur Weiss's blog and although he doesn't post that often he does post some good stuff. Check it out.
For the last couple of years I've had a "competitive intelligence" alert set up on Google. Every day I'd get an email with anywhere from one to five items, but since Google added blog tracking the number of items has exploded to around 15-20 per day. Most interesting to me is that there are a lot of job listings in the blog section. The only reason I can figure that the job listings are being included is that they're distributed as RSS feeds and are thus considered "blog" items. I'll look into it and update later.
FYI, the news feed to the left is an RSS stream of the "competitive intelligence" Google alert.
