By: Helton Haddad

The concerning of companies to its competitors has been raised in the last years, specially with the stirring up of the competition that we face at this globalization times. What many companies started to practise is a differentiated methodology  to develop competitor's analysi, inside a strategic view, broad and very practical. The concept of "Competitive Intelligence"defines this new way of thinking and acting.

But what is this called CI? Leonard Fuld, american writter specialized at this theme, says that CI is defined as "the high specific information and located in time about an organization". This distinguishes it from the concept of data or information. While data are "disconected pieces of knowledge", information is "the composition of data", being this last ones already analysed. But information only turns into intelligence if its well analysed, compared to other companies from its branch and its last experience. Therefore, the intelligence is a distict way of information, actually a "information with value added", being an organized and evaluated source of strategic information, which supports a detailed and systemic analysis of the competitor's position, its performance and its eventual threats.

The importance of structuring a CI process can be  illustrated by the phrase of Sun Tzu, autor of the famous book "The art of war", very commented nowadays: "Know the enemy and know yourself, at a thousand battles you will never be in danger. When you ignore the enemy, but know yourself, your chance of win or lose is equal. And if you ignore both the enemy and yourself, in every battle you will be in danger."

The CI practice has a strong importance in business today, since the managers have to adopt a direct style, oriented to action and focused on visible factors of the competitive environment. In many cases this behavior is improvised, and ends in resultactions where it is considered only some fragmented aspects of the busness environment.

We consider important to point the relevance of CI - despite of many companies agree, the major part ends up doing an informal following of the intelligence, many times ad hoc and not coordenated. It's evident that, in these cases, rarely we obtain relevant information and strategically exploited. On the other hand, in our experience as consultants, we perceive that companies that develop the implantation of a CI process well structures generate efective intelligence, which can be used at defense and attack to competitors, besides being an important factor to define competitive business strategies.

In this competitive environment, also CI tends to be more a differential between companies, specially at a time when offers from many competitors tend to be equivalent. To deal with this trend of goods becoming once more standardized, indifferentiated and "comodities like", know the competitors moves can be a way to differentiation and sustainable competitive advantage.