Rapid product and service innovation requires almost fanatical attention to marketplace trends and to the actions of competitors. Given the huge volume of information now available from countless electronic sources over the Internet, keeping up-to-date should seem extraordinarily easy. On the contrary, our work with Global 1000 clients has revealed that even with this abundance of information, many executives complain about the lack of real intelligence available for making good strategic and tactical decisions. Delving deeper, we have found that many market research analysts and competitive intelligence professionals do not have the internal business processes and software tools necessary to make use of this information.

Our work with numerous clients has uncovered three common problems regarding information availability and access:

• Information silos
• Information overload
• Poor organization of the information.

We have found that by applying the appropriate business processes and tools, these problems can be readily addressed, resulting in market research and competitive intelligence information that is relevant, on-point, and can be widely distributed to decision makers throughout the enterprise.