Leveraging Competitive Intelligence (CI) to inform strategic decision-making: the Indian parlance

By Nitin Rohatgi – Co-founder & Partner, Enroute Consulting LLP

• Deliverables of a successful CI unit in an organization
• A steady budget allocation for CI activities to ensure higher (RoI) for products and services
• Indian corporates’ CI adoption as compared to western peers
• India – CI system still in a nascent stage viz-a-vis their western peers
• Industries/verticals in India which stand to benefit greatly through the implementation of an effective CI strategy

Competitive Intelligence (CI) has to be an ongoing exercise. There cannot be one-off deliverables. A successful CI unit would have the responsibility of not only executing the CI KRAs, but, more than that, should lobby with the management and the important stakeholders within the organization, on the need and importance of constant and continuous CI. The key deliverables of course would comprise tracking competitors round the clock of any moves and developments around their strategy, product/service improvements/modifications, pricing, people movement and organizational announcements.

Also, in today’s fast-paced, connected information age, CI delivery has to leverage Information technology, to provide for continuous anytime, anywhere, any-device intelligence.

CI, to me, is the backbone of any successful strategy; and no planning exercise can be complete without allocating a specified spend on CI initiatives, constantly, throughout the business calendar. Product improvement strategies/initiatives and new product development cannot begin without proper CI and; in fact, a comprehensive CI exercise would be the first step towards ensuring the desired ROI from the product/service being launched/spruced up.

The Indian corporates, in my mind, have only recently (past couple of years) realised the need and importance of CI (viz-a-vis their western peers) and have begun to initiate organised CI efforts only now. I believe that CI as an organized function is still a far cry from reality in most Indian corporates and unlike their western counterparts, Indian companies still have to formulate a concrete ‘Compete’ strategy.

As indicated above, I feel the Indian corporate have well and truly woken up to realise the importance of CI and the role it plays in strategy formulation for the organisation; but that movement is still quite new (if not nascent) and is gaining momentum to evolve the practice of CI into an organized effort / function within the corporate.

While an effective CI strategy is imperative for the success of any organization in today’s date; the major sectors to be benefitted from an organized CI initiative in India would be IT & Telecom as well as Pharma & Healthcare; as these sectors are currently undergoing massive changes and reforms and growing rapidly.