Competitive Intelligence: Gathering Analysing and Putting it to Work
Christopher Murphy, Gower, 2005, xxvi + 273 pages, £55.00.

Despite a lifetime in information gathering, collating and providing actionable reports, it came as something of a surprise to learn of the existence and activities of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, an American body, reflecting the processes embodied in this book’s title (CI) and that the author has been an SBE member since 2003. Just goes to show that you can never be too old to learn.

The readership claimed for this book is wide-ranging and ambitious: specialists in monitoring competitive developments; managers in other functional roles involved in tracking competitive trends; information professionals; senior management; management consultants; corporate financiers; commercial lawyers; financial public relations executives; managers of smaller businesses; investment analysts; investment professionals; financial and business journalists; teachers and students of business studies; trade association and chamber of commerce officials; public servants concerned with the business world; and employees of not-for-profit organisations involved in corporate research.

Murphy has been a specialist in CI for fifteen years and has run courses on it for seven years. The book demonstrates his accumulated experience using a succinct, carefully-structured format and style, best illustrated by a piquant quote:

“CI analysts are expected to do their job in a dispassionate, objective way. They must constantly battle against their own preconceptions, unchallenged assumptions, prejudices, wishful thinking and pet theories (before even beginning to struggle against these vices among their colleagues). … Only ...a powerful commitment to their discipline can give them the psychological strength to put forward and defend their case (based as it usually is on imperfect data and clouded by uncertainty) in the face of scepticism, vested interests and more senior colleagues who disagree with it. …the exemplary CI analyst has to be indifferent to whether he is alone or in good company… and more obsessed with whether he is right than whether his boss likes him.”

The twenty-four chapters are grouped into three parts – steps towards more effective competitive intelligence; collecting data; and turning raw data into finished intelligence. Coverage ranges from information obtained from company accounts, both in the UK and overseas, to economic forecasting and other analytical techniques, taking in how to perform CI tasks, including where to find information.

For example, advice is offered on knowing when to stop searching, or a data hierarchy is described, ranging from verified facts, or reasonably secure facts, to probabilities, rumours, errors and the unknown.

The SBE is mentioned for its website links to forecasting organisations and, less directly, via a reference from The Challenge of Change: Fifty Years of Business Economics. However, an illustration of the speed at which a statement may become outdated is the sad fact that the ONS Official Yearbook of the United Kingdom, praised by the author as “superb”, is being discontinued.

Although at first glance this book just looks like a comprehensive tour of the various techniques it describes and may seem to be relatively elementary, it bristles with useful observations, based on experiences the author has obviously encountered in the course of working in this field. They provide helpful clues to either yielding more effective performance or avoiding pitfalls or ‘elephant-traps’. For example, “analysts have to strive to report their findings succinctly.”

All toilers in the fields described could benefit from the fertile ideas this book imparts.