A practical close-up analysis of what CI is today, its uses, its contexts–with a comprehensive discussion of its impact on the bottom line and a long look at the means to measure its effectiveness and value. Almost two decades after it emerged as an essential business tool, competitive intelligence is still finding its way. Its importance is clearly recognized, but it is proving hard to get the kind of intelligence that companies most need, and equally hard to measure its effectiveness and value when they do get it. McGonagle and Vella seek to change that. Their book provides CI professionals and other end-users with the tools they must have to select the right kind of CI for their own organizations, then to assess where and how CI actually contributes to their companies’ financial performance. The authors identify three fundamental, intertwined mistakes a company can make, then show how to evaluate them, how to repair the damage they may have done–the essential first steps before any effort can be made to measure CI’s effectiveness. You’ll get insight into the currently used forms of CI, means to find and select it, the best ways to report its findings, and then a clear, workable, bottom-line metric. Indeed, the failure to measure CI’s effectiveness is continuously cited as a - perhaps the–major problem in implementing CI programs, and so far McGonagle and Vella are the only CI professionals who have come up with a sensible, useful way of doing this. Their book is thus an important new resource for CI practitioners, their clients, and others they report to–and for all who know that their companies need CI but don’t know how to get it. McGonagle and Vella start by dissecting the state of CI today. They show how it has evolved into five different but overlapping types, with different characteristics, each of which demands a different evaluating metric. They develop a framework to help determine which type of CI fits one’s own special needs, then the best ways to communicate CI up and down the line - as reports? newsflashes? by other means? All are reviewed and assessed. They go on to discuss the most common categories of sources for raw data, the bases of support for all CI analyses. They tackle the issues of how metrics in general can work, why they can fail, and the key features that differentiate one metric from another. Finally, they provide a process that CI professionals and related end users can employ immediately, right out of the box. Not only will it help select the metric most appropriate for their own unique organizational context from among the many processes and metrics currently available, it will also prove essential as they seek to evaluate the future metrics sure to come.
