Executive summary. Delivering Maximum Strategic Value with Market Monitoring, страница 7

As a general paradigm, the context and thus the taxonomy needed for a market monitoring process consists of two groups of categories: one to describe the competitive landscape and another to describe strategic themes. The part of the taxonomy describing the competitive landscape should identify the most important players in the competitive landscape, broken down by a value-chain dimension into customers, competitors, suppliers, partners (e.g. technology providers), and regulators. Moreover, if a company is operating in several markets, each market should be identified. This could be done by geographies, by customer segments, by product lines, or all of them. Finally, the taxonomy should include as categories a set of strategic themes, which represent concepts, topics, trends, or any other strategic priorities that are chosen to be in focus in the current strategy.

The following sums up this general structure of a good taxonomy, derived from Exhibit 6 below that illustrates the competitive landscape of an organization. The illustration serves as the basis for the taxonomy, i.e. the list of things in the external business environment that are relevant for the organization:

•  Competitors, customers, suppliers, partners and regulators

•  Geographies, customer segments and product lines

•  Strategic themes

The following list, based on a substantial pool of experience, provides some additional advice on how to build a good taxonomy.

•  Strategy determines what kind of information is relevant for the market monitoring                process. Taxonomy should be a representation of the context implied by the                            company’s strategy and be reminiscent of the strategy when examined on its own.

•  Consider the needs of different business functions, but use a common taxonomy.                     The taxonomy should be a company-wide representation of the relevant context and it                   can provide valuable insight by connecting pieces of information across functional               boundaries. The taxonomy should rather reflect the relevant external business envi-          ronment of the company than its own organizational structure.

•  Don’t exaggerate the number of categories. Evaluate the usefulness of each individual category carefully based on whether it can provide insight to the decision-maker. There is no point in having categories that are rarely or never used, or categories that are outdated or have no meaning in the mind of the decision-maker. Become suspicious if there are more than one hundred categories in the taxonomy.

•  Understand the difference of implementing strategies and formulating strategies.                    Most market monitoring systems are designed for implementing strategies. Taxono-                     mies for supporting strategic planning require special considerations which are elabo-           rated in the last chapter of this paper.

The taxonomy is a useful tool in all of the stages of the market monitoring process. By embodying the strategic context and priorities of the company, it provides a guideline for sourcing and filtering information. In the processing phase, as content is transformed into intelligence deliverables, tagging effectively groups together content items and creates linkages between small pieces of information that form more insightful knowledge structures as a result. These knowledge structures should then be presented and possibly visualized in the delivery stage. In fact, utilizing the taxonomy in the delivery stage is particularly critical. While any individual content item needs to be relevant and well-presented, letting the decision-makers search, aggregate, and visualize content, correlations between categories, and linkages between individual content items, they are able to gain new understanding of the business environment as a whole rather than just one small part of it.