Executive summary. Delivering Maximum Strategic Value with Market Monitoring, страница 6

It should be kept in mind, however, that with regards to market monitoring, the strategic planning process has a special status, as was explained in the beginning of this paper. With that consideration in mind, Exhibit 4 further divides the market monitoring process into MAMOS and EWOS, that way highlighting the linkage of both to the different business processes.

6 CONTENT AND CONTEXT

Some of the biggest challenges in market monitoring have to do with the delivered content itself. When there are large volumes of irrelevant information, the content delivered by the market monitoring process is considered noise rather than information. To avoid this perception, the process should instead deliver concise and relevant information in a timely manner and in a format that makes the information easy to absorb.

For the information to be valuable and actionable, it has to have meaning to the decision-maker. Meaning, in turn, can be established by reference to a context. Indeed, it is the lack of context that so often renders content meaningless. Context is derived directly from the current strategy of the company and refers to the framework of concepts, topics, themes, and priorities that are chosen to be the focus of attention throughout the company. Naturally, people working in different functions may focus only on a subset of the context while the top management of the company is concerned with the entirety.

It is noteworthy that context implied by strategy is a broader concept than the strategy itself. The strategy dictates what should belong to the context and what should not. For example, if the company has decided to pursue a strategy of cost leadership while competing in the market for a specified product, then the relevant context for the company is made up of the competitors, the current and potential customers for that product, all players in the supply-chain, and the production technologies or management principles that can lead the company to the goal of cost leadership.

The importance of context is easy to defend in theory, but how can context be established in practice in a market monitoring system? The answer lies in taxonomies. A taxonomy is a system for classifying content in an information system, a representation of the business context. A market monitoring system is such an information system and usually includes a database, various inbound data feeds, tools for analyzing and processing information, and outbound delivery mechanisms. Overarching the market monitoring process is the context, derived from strategy and represented by a taxonomy.

In practice, the taxonomy is a set of categories or classes which are organized hierarchically. Each content item in the market monitoring system is tagged, in other words marked as belonging to one or more of the categories. Tagging has already become a standard practice in many kinds of information systems, but the purpose and value of the practice in market monitoring is sometimes poorly understood. The key benefit from tagging is to establish a business context to any piece of information, thus pointing out to the decision-maker how it fits in with the big picture of business strategy. To add value, however, the taxonomy has to be built expertly.

GIA Best Practices White Paper 2/2010  Delivering Maximum Strategic Value with Market Monitoring