With SinglePoint, you don’t have to spend time monitoring your competitors

Traditionally, competitive intelligence (CI) research has involved a lot of monitoring: Google searches of competitors’ websites and announcements; culling through industry news and journals; reviewing subscription market intelligence reports; keeping tabs on government databases.  In other words, a lot of time spent manually searching a long list of sources.

Much to the relief of CI professionals and business researchers across all functions in large enterprises, that’s no longer the case.

SinglePoint automates CI monitoring

Northern Light SinglePoint™ does a lot of good things for a company’s market and competitive intelligence capabilities.  Perhaps most importantly, it virtually eliminates the time-consuming burden of monitoring your competitors.  That’s because SinglePoint – an enterprise-class knowledge management platform optimized for market and competitive intelligence – does the monitoring automatically, leaving CI staff and other users, across all departments and business units, free to perform higher-level tasks, like analyzing all that competitive intelligence.

How is that possible?  There are several reasons.

Automated content aggregation and distribution

First, SinglePoint is a “content factory” – it a system that automatically ingests and then consistently tags and indexes documents from authorized internal and external sources into a single integrated, readily searchable content database. The factory operates continuously, adding content from all authorized sources on a regularly scheduled basis. CI professionals don’t have to go looking in dozens (or more!) of different locations for the content they and their internal clients need to review.

Second, SinglePoint has a robust insight distribution ecosystem, so CI professionals don’t have to spend time manually pushing documents processed by the “content factory” to their internal clients.  The ecosystem includes Northern Light’s recommendation engine (the Recommended Reading List), which learns each user’s preferences for content and then starts proactively finding content the user should care about based on what the system has learned.  In addition, SinglePoint offers the capability to monitor and push content as RSS feeds and email alerts to individuals from internal and external sources that are personalized or created by subject matter experts on common topics.  And SinglePoint also provides a robust newsletter tool that is very successful at delivering breaking updates.

The most popular component of Northern Light’s insight distribution ecosystem is SinglePoint’s rich themed dashboard system, which is one of the unique strengths of the platform.  Dashboards are a highly visual, “browse-to-content” way to organize and consume content around a topic or company of particular interest to a business researcher or decision-maker.  Subject matter experts or administrators within an organization can create themed dashboards on business units, topics, technologies, market segments, marketing programs, management challenges – essentially, anything relevant to any group of users.  Best of all, much of the content updates automatically.  Many types of content flow automatically into the right dashboard widgets, greatly reducing support requirements for a robust set of dashboards and making it practical to maintain dozens of dashboards with a time investment of just a few hours per week.

At the end of the day (more typically, at the start of each day), CI professionals don’t want to spend most of their time searching for and compiling content from myriad sources. They want to do the job they were trained for and that adds the most value to their organization: analyzing competitive intelligence.  With Northern Light SinglePoint, they can.