Riding The Competitive Intelligence Automation Wave
“The legal and ethical collection and analysis of information regarding the capabilities, vulnerabilities, and intentions of business competitors” – Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals
This is how Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), the most well-known global body on Competitive Intelligence (CI), defines the concept of CI. For the uninitiated, the page on the organization‘s Code of Ethics for CI professionals sheds lights on the innards of the practice. One does not have to belabor the importance of the practice in the context of successfully operating a business. It is in the operational details, as is the case with most details, that the devil lies.
From an operational standpoint, CI professionals can be classified as either employees of a company or that of a specialized service provider. In case of the former, the practice team can either be housed within a larger department or, infrequently, have an independent existence. The service sector has burgeoned over the last decade or so with the rising tide of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). Both these sets of professionals are increasingly being impacted by automation, to an extent, in profoundly different ways.
The in-house CI practitioners are increasingly interfacing with IT departments as well as analytical tools given the augmentation of data and the need for infusion of technology for attendant analysis. Such interaction, through facilitating pronounced value generation, fosters increased time to value. On the flip side, the limitations of the traditional approach of manual data curation render it difficult for the small-ish CI teams to effectively meet time-sensitive business needs. The gamut of challenges that the specialist offshoring industry faces is of a different hue altogether.
The recent statement of Capgemini India’s CEO that a large portion of India’s IT industry is not equipped to deal with technology evolution made it to the headlines. Whether or not the prediction manifests itself remains to be seen. What is undeniable, though, is that the CI offshoring space as well is in the eye of the perfect storm of technological disruption. Conversation after conversation with senior management of pharmaceutical and technology companies that I have been privy to recently have centered on the themes of process automation, accelerating time to value, and of course, limiting costs. The advent of solutions anchored to advances in a suite of technologies ranging from semantic enrichment and natural language processing to new age storage and databases pose formidable contest to the traditional CI approaches. The competition can be explained by the symmetry between technology offering and the nature of the practice of CI.
An absorbing piece in The New Yorker reported studies by MIT economists that characterized jobs as functions of cognition and routine. The simplistic illustration below categorizes occupations in a matrix using the parameters.
The framework is anchored to what is known as the “task approach” to labor markets. For those with an academic inclination, a deeper understanding of the subject can be gleaned from this paper. Given that academicians are exceedingly polite folks in general, the term ‘Routine’ is not to be perceived as a derogatory remark.
