Competitive Intelligence and Social Advantage

THISARTICLE PRESENTS A BRIEF CONSPECTUS of current issues in civilian competitive intelligence (CI). The authors note an extension of the concept beyond the traditional focus on business competition and highlight emergent tools and techniques (networking and groupware) which allow the concept to be more generally operationalized in terms of social advantage. They conclude with some reflections on the possible role of library and information science (LIS) programs in providing key CI skills and competencies such as searching, summarizing, analysis, synthesis, and interpretation. ACADEMIC ADVANTAGE The writing of this article is a competitive act. It involves the giving, receiving, and interpreting of signals, and the understanding of the rules which determine interaction in a given social environment. The authors, who are practicing academics, wish to send certain signals, both institutional and personal. First, that their institution is active in the CI field (image management, in other words). Second, that they, as individuals, seek association with this field (what might be termed product positioning). In addition, they have linked their work by means of references to others in the field, and they seek to claim priority in the presentation of certain ideas and in the innovative linking of certain literature sets. As academics, both authors wish to add another unit of publication in a recognized Elisabeth Davenport ,School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 Blaise Cronin, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 43, No. 2, Fall 1994, pp. 239-52 @ 1994 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 240 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALL 1994 journal to their rksumes, as this may be used along with other activity indicators as a measure of individual faculty performance. A reader who wishes to analyze the competitive position and strategies of LIS schools in the United States might infer from this publication that the authors’ school is staking a claim in the area of CI. Such signals only have meaning in context. As specialists in a given social environment, both authors must identify and conform to the internal (social norms) and external (environmental constraints) rules which ensure the viability of their social group (see, for example, Becher, 1989). Work must not be plagiarized-e.g., sources and assistance must be acknowledged, copyright and patent legislation must be complied with, and the work should have no implications in terms of product liability. The authors maintain that such understanding of the internal and external environmen t-Bourdieu’s (1991, p. 12) habitus-which emerges from competitive intelligence activities is the key to sustaining social advantage or ensuring viability in any context. Identifying and operating by the rules is not sufficient, however. Players in a given sector must also be able to interpret the moves of others and the ways in which coplayers are likely to interpret a given situation or milieu. A paper submitted for publication to a journal, for example, has to compete for space; an experienced author will sometimes check the characteristics which determine the quality of a given journal, monitor the composition of the editorial board, and engineer a submission to f i t (see, for example, Myers, 1990). Insider knowledge of the editorial calendar may ensure that one submission is more timely than another and so on. A similar knowledge of the rules, and how those rules are interpreted, will determine success or failure in many areas of academic life, such as applications for posts, grant/funding proposals, and the preparation and submission of both curriculum documentation and course syllabi. EDUCXTIONAL EDGE The sustaining of competitive advantage in academic and research environments goes well beyond the personal and institutional. Cawkell (1991) has described how the ISI’s (Institute for Scientific Information) Science Citation Zndex can be used for competitive intelligence: This process opens up a means of gathering intelligence for such purposes as estimating the impact of work done by an individual or an organization or noting the growth, diminution, or change in the activities of a science-based company, educational or research establishment, or even an entire country (p. 29). Such tools have been used for more than a decade in the United Kingdom for DAVENPORT & CRONINANTELLIGENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANTAGE 241 research evaluation purposes, though the most recent initiative (the Technology Foresight Programme) will use a Delphi technique, copied from Japan, to identify an array of technologies which promise the United Kingdom the most social and economic benefit (Bown, 1993). Output in the form of publication is one of many factors in determining the competitiveness of a given institution. Input, in terms of infrasuuctural investment, for example, is also important. Campuswide information systems are recognized as an important element in attracting high calibre students, faculty, donors, and investors (Arms, 1988; Cronin, 1989). Investment in infrastructure is obviously important at the national level. Many of the public statements which support federal investment in the national research and education network (NREN) have stressed its significance to the future industrial competitiveness of the United States. By allowing universal access to key resources, the proposed initiative should have, in theory, a leveraging effect on the general level of education, a variable identified by Porter (1990) as a strategic factor in national competitiveness. Already the Internet offers scope for accelerating technology transfer by bringing researchers and industrialists into closer contact and showcasing prototypes to potentially interested audiences. THETRADITIONAL APPROACH The elements of intelligence work are summarized neatly by Kipling (1912): I keep six honest serving-men/ (They taught me all I knew)/ Their names are What and Why and When/ And How and Where and Who (p. 83). The historic approach to competitive intelligence has focused on sources of information, which allow five of the six men to be identified-the “why,” however, relies on analysis of patterns and interpretations of sources. Fuld, writing in 1985, makes similar points, but also emphasizes the importance of “Uncle Sams Library,” or public domain information (e.g., federal and state registers, pp. 85-135). A decade later, the L-word is frequently invoked to describe the Internet (the world’s largest public library [Tetzeli, 19941; the postal service, telephone system and research library of the electronic age [Lewis, 1993, F7]), an interesting legitimation which may help to boost librarians’ self-esteem (Chitwood, 1992). The role of the Internet in accessing federal material has been endorsed in recent legislation-the Government Printing Office Electronic Access Enhancement Act of 1993, for instance. Although the word library does justice to the scale of holdings and the diversity of content available on the Internet, it does not capture the analytic and interpretative aspects of CI. The idea of a national intelligence system is not new, however. Learned (1924) conceptualized the public library 242 LIBRARY TRENDWFALL 1994 as a community intelligence service, though technology has only recently evolved which allows the idea to be operationalized. The early proponents of competitive intelligence activity place it firmly in the strategic planning level of the company (see, for example, Synnott, 1987). A highly developed version of this is offered by Beer (1986) who posits a phrontisterion, or strategic war room, with wall-to-wall monitors which constantly display the current state of an enterprise and allow anomalies to be identified and rapidly worked on (p. 194). Beer’s description of the technology for this thinktank is prescient (he first introduced the concept in the early 198Os), and any version of the war-room today would probably be enhanced by an electronic meeting system (Polley & Stone, 1993). Linking competitive intelligence to a strategic apex is only one of several possible approaches. Porter (1985) has identified the need for monitoring and analysis at any level of a company, and studies of work practices in Japanese companies support this view (Lagerstam, 1990; Nakagawa, 1993). Peters (1992) argues that the success of German Mittelstand (small and medium-sized) enterprises, the backbone of the German economy, is due to a similar process of observation, interaction, and information exchange at all levels. COVERTAND OVERT INTELLIGENCE COMPETITIVE The history of commercial intelligence is covered in Dedijer’s (1983) early work (see also, Rayward, 1992) with the unrefined list (e.g. inventories, shipping movements, prices, and so on) a primary presentation medium. Lists can tell the enquirer who is involved in a particular area, what they did, where they were operating, and when they were active. How and why an organization has acted in the way it did can only be inferred: the analysis has to move beyond the raw list to look at context, organizational climate and culture, and patterns of previous behavior. The Competitive Intelligence Review, the journal of the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), provides frequent case studies from a range of industrial and service sectors (see, for example, Kight, 1992). Such overt commercial intelligence has always had covert activity as its concomitant; the tension between making something public in the interests of the community (if you publicize the times of shipping, you attract clients who wish to ship) and concealing it in the interests of personal advantage (then a rival company could preempt you) is endemic in attempts to achieve social advantage. The academic sector which the authors invoked earlier as an example of a competitive social environment offers a further example in this DAVENPORT & CRONIN/INTELLIGENCE AND SOCIAL ADVANTAGE 243 context-nondisclosure of work funded by a commercial sponsoran increasing trend (Etzkowitz, 1989) which some think may contribute ultimately to the erosion of the academic journal (Davenport, 1993). Patents offer the most invoked example of the covert/overt tension-public yet protected. Again, i t is the analysis of patents that provides their main interest as a source of intelligence, as the strategic intentions of an individual research group, company, or national jurisdiction can be assessed from the interpretation of targeted subject areas and filing patterns over time (Campbell, 1983; Coy et al., 1993). There is, of course, a paradox. If everybody is potentially familiar with the great majority of sources of competitive intelligence, what is competitive about those sources? Subsequent analysis can differentiate source materials which are commonly available, as does an analyst’s evaluation of their scope and inherent reliability. DATA DIVERSITY Much of the above material can be handled by those trained in traditional LIS skills-searching and retrieving, “parking and marking.” Traditional skills may be insufficient to handle a more diverse intelligence mix. As early as the mid-l960s, the literature reveals the importance of diversity in sourcing and of multiple perspectives. Aguilar (1967) classified environmental scanning for managers into four modes: undirected viewing or constant monitoring, conditioned viewing, informal search, and formal search (p. 19). A brief overview of the topic has been offered recently by Choo and Auster (1993) while Porter’s (1980) seminal text on competitive strategy advocates the exploitation of a heterogeneous set of source materials (from Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] filings to industry gossip). There exists a mass of less structured information. Soft sources like phone calls, ephemera, conversations, and e-mail, which are not typically managed through formal means, can serve as important assets or even weapons as in the unethical case of blackmail. Internal information, which may be secret or proprietary, is contained within a source environment (the clan, campus, or company) but can seep out into the wider world as rumor or speculation. Street-level information of this kind is exchanged in real time, lacks structure, and tends to be disseminated by gossips and industry insiders through virtual colleges and old boy networks (Cronin & Davenport, 1990). An integrated technology base is one of the conditions that allows individuals or groups to harvest and process intelligence. A primary function is the ability to communicate and exchange information via telecommunications networks. The ability to exchange must be supplemented with the ability to trap such exchanges and to analyze what has been trapped-the significance of a message may not be 244 LIBRARY TRENDS/FALL 1994 manifest until it is placed in a background of other messages. So, a further requirement of the technical base is the ability to broadcatch or gather information from multiple channels in multiple formats. As has been noted frequently, positive redundancy is a requirement of effective intelligence gathering (see, for example, Cronin, 1992). Developments in the integration of material delivered in multiple formats can be tracked in the hypermedia/hypertext and CSCW (computer-supported collaborative work) literature (Davenport & Baird, 1992; Sproull & Keisler, 1991). Of particular interest is the work of Hillis (1985), whose connectionist technology is used by the data vendor Dow Jones to allow clients to analyze as well as source material (Day et al., 1993). Gelernter (1991) envisages parallel teams of agents whose processing capability can be compared to the neural networks that drive human intelligence (see also, Kupfer, 1994). Technology aside, there is a range of techniques for analyzing and interpreting interaction. Sociometric techniques (Grosser, 1991) expose underlying communication patterns and can be used, for instance, to assess the frequency and intensity of interaction between identified individuals or groups, and ethnographic techniques may uncover motives, values, beliefs, and sense-making (Geertz, 1973; Guba & Lincoln, 1989). A recent review is offered by Gilbert (1993). Software for capturing and analyzing such observations (“rich pictures” and “thick descriptions”) has been reviewed by Fielding and Lee (1991). Recent developments at Xerox PARC (ubiquitous computing) will allow close tracking of personnel movements and face-to-face interactions which can be archived to provide an intimate record of the work of consenting individuals and groups (FinancialTimes,1994). The technology involved includes active badges (worn on the lapel), video cameras, and live boards (Weiser, 1991).