Intelligent Competitive Intelligence Finds the People Who Need It

How smart is your company’s competitive intelligence?

If it’s sitting in a SharePoint site, probably not very.  Because truly intelligent competitive intelligence not only contains information about competitors, it mines itself for key insights, and delivers itself to the individuals within your organization who need to know about it.

SharePoint sites just don’t do that.  In fact, a competitive intelligence professional at a major bank in the southeastern U.S. recently told Northern Light, “I’ve been suffering in SharePoint hell trying everything in my power to get it to be something other than a static file folder system.”

In contrast, Northern Light puts the “intelligence” in competitive intelligence.  The “smarts” are a function of the knowledge management platform in which the content resides, rather than the content itself.  Of course, an organization must have rich and reliable content as a starting point.  But it’s what happens to the content within the platform that multiplies its value many-fold.

One key is for the platform to provide an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled insight distribution ecosystem – an infrastructure that directs relevant competitive intelligence content and insights to the individuals who need it, in a timely manner, via whatever medium or mechanism those individuals prefer, automatically.  Options include strategic dashboards, search results, newsletters, machine learning-driven recommendations and insights reports, email alerts, RSS, and more.

Northern Light’s SinglePoint knowledge management platform offers all this, and clients have found it makes a huge difference – both to those who manage the platform and those who rely on it to make informed business decisions.  In one case, a Northern Light client coordinates dashboards and newsletter strategies and distributes over 20,000 pieces of market intelligence a month to global staff members.

The goal of an insight distribution ecosystem is to maximize consumption of content by those who can put it to best use.  And the impact of strategic dashboards on content consumption is dramatic:  One Northern Light client reported a three-fold increase in content consumption following deployment of multiple strategic dashboards.

AI-based machine learning can contribute significantly to an efficient and effective insight distribution ecosystem.  For example, SinglePoint offers each user a personalized recommended reading list, generated by the system from watching the user’s behavior.  In addition, SinglePoint generates automated insights reports that distill the important information contained in documents that are part of a search result.  It’s as if each user has an AI-powered smart assistant silently working for them within the SinglePoint portal, unearthing valuable competitive intelligence and insights automatically from the entire repository.

The last thing in the world any organization wants is to underutilize a valuable asset.  Competitive intelligence made “dumb” because it is stored in a platform that keeps it virtually hidden from many who might benefit from it is the definition of an underutilized asset.  Intelligent competitive intelligence is essential for success in today’s hyper-competitive business environment, making a knowledge management platform that “smartens up” competitive intelligence content a wise investment indeed.

To discuss ways to make your organization’s competitive intelligence smarter, contact Northern Light.