The State of Competitive Intelligence within. New Zealand Private and Public Sector Organisations, страница 4

Introduction 

The aim of this research project is to compare and benchmark the current state of competitive intelligence within New Zealand’s private and public sectors environment against Trengrove and Vryenhoek study (1997) using explorative research. 

Trengrove’s and Vryenhoek’s study (1997) identified a number of key findings:

ƒ New Zealand companies and local government believed that their competitive environment was very challenging and that in 1997, believed that it would be more challenging in the future.

ƒ The average expenditure on competitive intelligence by companies with revenues of New Zealand $ 20 million or more was less than 0.05%.

ƒ The prominent source of gaining competitive information was word of mouth and personal contacts.  A general failure to use all sources of information in a comprehensive and cocoordinated manner was detected.

ƒ In 1997, forty-six percent of the respondents indicated that they had plans to improve their competitive intelligence processes.

ƒ Very few organisations understood the need and importance of protecting their strategic information by using counterintelligence methods.

As the business and economic environment has changed to what is now defined as the ‘Information Age’, this research examines the above findings to determine if these trends still exist and to provide a comparison to Trengrove’s and Vryenhoek’s  competitive intelligence study (1997). 

The role of Competitive Intelligence

While competitive intelligence has its origins based on Military Intelligence, in a corporate context, good or bad intelligence may not result in a ‘life or death’ situation in a time of war, but will determine if a company or organisation is successful and affluent.  Murphy believes that for a company to maintain its success, it needs intelligence to find suppliers, source and raise capital, win customers and fend off rivals (2005). 

To understand these values, Professor Porter’s ‘five forces’ model have informed the analysis of the industry and the players (i.e. companies and customers), and how they operate in a competitive environment (Murphy, 2005).  Porter’s model (Figure 1.0) provides a good insight into this environment by reducing the myriad of factors and provides a model which can be easily followed and can enable businesses and competitive intelligence practitioners to quickly view their competitive landscape.  

Figure 1.0 Porter’s Five Forces

Further expansion of these factors has been provided in the ‘Internal & External Business Drivers’ section of this report.

Sambamurthy and Subramani, also states that knowledge is a fundamental asset for companies in an increasingly knowledge-based global economy (2005) and links knowledge to competitive intelligence, by gathering  and turning raw knowledge data into intelligence through the process of applying judgment & wisdom (Murphy, 2005).  Competitive intelligence can provide companies / organisations with an early identification of risks and opportunities in the market before they become obvious.