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Nowadays, economic organizations are subject to external forces that they must live with and react
to: increasing sophistication of competitors, customers and suppliers, globalization of business,
international competition.
Perhaps the most critical component for success of the modern enterprise is its ability to take
advantage of all available information - both internal and external. It’s a real challenge, due to the
tremendous flow of information it’s facing every day. Also, the nature of information itself has changed,
in terms of volume, availability and importance. The data to be considered becomes more and more
complex in both structure and semantics.
With the Internet, Intranets, Groupware systems the volume of available data increases each day –
customer communications, internal research reports or competitors web sites are just some sources of
electronic data. Intellectual property and assets, knowledge are contained within the huge volumes of
information and leveraging this value is increasingly important in the competitive market.
Making sense of all this information, gaining value and competitive advantage through represents
real challenges for the enterprise. The IT solutions designed to address these challenges have been
developed in two different approaches: structured data management and unstructured content
management.
We can even think at these approaches in a more general perspective as being information
management technologies and knowledge management technologies – being aware in the same time that
information management it’s a part of knowledge management, as information can be considered a type
of knowledge (explicit knowledge).
Knowledge management technologies, while less mature than information management
technologies, are more and more capable of combining content management systems and the Web with
vastly improved searching and text mining capabilities to derive more value from the explosion of
textual information.
Integrating Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management in order to respond to the
challenges the modern enterprise has to deal with represents not only a „new trend” in IT, but a
necessity. Over time, techniques from both technologies blended, Competitive Intelligence Systems are
a direct result of such integration.
By its very nature, no business is isolated. In doing its activity, the business will need to deal with
customers, suppliers, employees, and others. In almost all cases there will also be other organizations
offering similar products to similar customers and seeking similar objectives: growth, profit and fame.
These other organizations are known as competitors. Competitiveness is a natural relationship
between businesses. Business competitors are other organizations offering the same product or service in
the present time but also in the future and also organizations that could remove the need for a product or
service by offering substitutes or changing habits. Monitoring competitors worth a lot because it
provides necessary knowledge to be able to predict their next moves, exploit their weaknesses and
undermine their strengths. According to Arthur Weiss, founder managing partner of AWARE company
which has an international reputation within the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals
(SCIP), there are four stages in monitoring competitors - the four "C"s:
1. Collecting the information
2. Converting information into intelligence
3. Communicating the intelligence
4. Countering any adverse competitor actions (making use of gathered intelligence)
This approach is war-like, with terminology taken from the military field (intelligence,
counterintelligence and techniques as well).
All businesses are fighting to gain the same resource and occupy the same territory: the market.
And like in war, it is necessary to understand the enemy: his vision, his strengths, where he is
vulnerable; where he can be attacked; where the risk of attack is too great and so on. The war-like
approach of the business relationship with the competitors led to a new branch of IT applications
designated to support competitive intelligence - CI information systems.
Customers: Without customers a business can't survive. Businesses need to sell their products and
services. Business intelligence helps businesses understand their customers better, looking at their
preferences, helping businesses adapt to their customers demand. Business intelligence is used to collect
data from customers usually within the marketplace. There are many ways to collect data from your
customers; it can be as easy as a POS system (point of sale), collecting data on what customers are
buying and which products they are not interested in, collecting data on customer habits and preferences
by asking them in surveys or polls. There are even marketplace specialists that watch customers
behavior in the marketplace and report back to the companies giving them insight into how their
customer respond to stores, personnel and product and services that a business sells.
Once this data is collected, it is up to an organization to use this data appropriately. Business
intelligence is a process in which vast amounts of data can be viewed and vetted giving managers and
business owner's important information that can be resourceful.
Competitors: Not only do businesses have to keep customers satisfied buying their products, they
also have to compete with competitors that are constantly looking to poach a business’s customers and
make them their own. Businesses today must constantly evaluate the effectiveness of their competitors
and choose smart strategies that not only hold their competitors at bay, but also grow their own
businesses market share. Business intelligence can help a business determine the strategies that your
competitors are using to steal customers away, as well as help your own business to differentiate itself
from others, effectively growing a larger and more profitable customer base.
Business Partners: Business partners are essential to any business, whether it is suppliers,
payment processing companies, customer support companies or delivery companies that help your
business throughout its cycle, it is important to make sure that all businesses partners associated with
your business are in balance with you. Having a supplier that isn't able to keep up with your demand or
having a customer service contractor that is unable to help you with certain support problems can cause
your business to fail. If you want your business to work smoothly and effectively, all business partners
must be in line with each other. For instance, today many businesses share key data with their suppliers
so that their suppliers can anticipate present and future inventory levels and make adjustments, which
inevitably help your business. Sharing information is key and being able to gather information and
sharing appropriate information is where business intelligence is important.
Economic Environment: Another way that business intelligence can help an organization is by
taking into consideration key economic indicators such as consumer spending, inflation, unemployment,
upturns and downturns in the economy, etc. Without business intelligence, your organization can't
process information effectively in order to modify strategies that fit the current economy.
Internal Operations: Internal operations are usually defined as the ongoing day to day activities
of a business or organization. If you want your business to be successful, you need to be able to view
your business's strengths and weaknesses on a daily basis. You also need to see at any moment, just how
much profit your business is making and your liabilities. Without decent foresight, you might make
hasty decisions such as commit to new spending or paying off debt when your business could allocate
those funds somewhere else. Business intelligence is extremely important to gauge your current state of
business, as well as all parts that constitute the whole of the business together to see where funds are
needed, what part of a business is weak and what parts of your business is strong.
Once businesses know what to look at to give them information that they need to analyze, it is
important to gather this data and then use business intelligence methodologies to sift through the data to
provide solutions to common everyday business problems. One of the ways to accomplish these tasks is
with Key Performance Indicators. KPI, are a way that business intelligence can analyze and evaluate the
current state of a business and then use this information to choose a strategy and then execute this
strategy.
Some businesses track Key Performance Indicators each year or quarter, some each month or week
and if you have the means, many corporations try to track specific data daily in order to fine tune or
tweak their strategies.
SAP has a multi-prong strategy with these two new major releases in 2010 to meet the needs of business
and IT while ensuring the usability and simplicity of their offerings can reach the broadest set of
individuals across an organization and their customers and partners. It is great to see the level of passion
and commitment from SAP at all levels of management at the Influencer Summit. This strategy and set
of products will help SAP ensure that it can advance the cause of BI and business analytics by helping
organizations to more broadly deploy these capabilities as a basic business necessity.
Even if classification information on many companies regarding activity object and delivered
products are not always accurate, many cross analysis could give some insights on Romanian economy.
Future developments aims to insert statistical references provided by National Institute of Statistics and
could be expanded to accommodate data from other countries economies. The utmost use of such
competitive intelligence application could be done if implemented inside a governmental organization
like Finances Ministry. The exploiting possibilities vary from market segmentation and benchmarking to
estimated value chains and trophic chains. The application is an attempt to apply business intelligence
technologies to economic environment analysis making use of Romanian public data sources.