Posted: 09/1997

Know Your Enemy

The Role of Competitive Intelligence in the
Telecom Industry

By Steve Racz

The world’s most stunningly successful companies did not
arrive at their preeminent positions by reading tea leaves to
understand the behavior of their competitors and the direction of
their markets.

Companies like Metropolitan Life, General Electric, Intel,
Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Merck, Coca-Cola and Proctor &
Gamble instead embraced the notion that strategic intelligence
gathering, known as competitive intelligence (CI), would create a
crucial knowledge asset that would enable competitive advantage.
Such companies did not take up the practice upon their arrival at
the top, rather, CI helped to take them up and over the top in
industries that by anyone’s estimation are complex and intensely
competitive.

They have all made competitive intelligence a high priority
strategic initiative and have integrated the discipline into the
corporate cultures. This sharpening of the competitive reflexes
has helped these firms to remain in top form. As is often stated,
most companies would rather be the architects of change, than its
victims.

The telecom industry is still in its post-Telecom Act a
ramp-up period, but the storm is gathering and will turn telecom
in to what many see as the most competitive business environments
in modern history. Long distance carriers and resellers have been
in a competitive marketplace for some time now and some
companies, most notably AT&T, have made the plunge into the
CI arena. Regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs), on the other
hand, have been sheltered but have now begun to enter the fray as
competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) threaten their market
share and a wide range of long distance options open to them. A
gaggle of other satellite, cable and wireless companies will
complicate the markets and drive the industry to the fore of
competitive intelligence consumption.

CI: The Overview

Competitive intelligence is used to secure and analyze
information about competitors’ activities, and general business
trends to enhance market share, profitability and overall
position. It is a behavior that is proactive or supply driven
rather than reactive or demand driven. CI applications are very
broad and can assist in every organizational function including,
but not limited to, research and development, advertising, sales,
marketing, distribution and finance.

It can tell a national sales manager how the competitors sales
force is being compensated and structured, for instance. CI might
also provide a company with information on how much a competitor
is spending or will spend on a product roll out and precisely
where those funds will be allocated. It might also reveal what
your competitors know about you, and perhaps whether or not you
are a target for an acquisition. On a different level, CI might
provide insights into which technology standards are likely to
become dominant which can leverage one’s equipment investments
limiting integration nightmares.

While competitive intelligence can be very esoteric and
"sleuth-like," most CI is conducted using readily
available information sources such as databases, the Internet
home pages and even through obscure uniform commercial code
filings.

In spite of these readily available resources, Business
Week estimated that fewer than 10 percent of all U.S.
companies have formalized CI function. European and Asian
companies, and their governmental confederates, however, are
deftly using CI to compete. CI is even part of industrial policy
in emerging nations such as Korea, China and Indonesia in their
drive to play "catch-up" on the global economic stage.
The governments of Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and the
Netherlands also are involved in worldwide intelligence
gathering. With the globalization of telecommunications, U.S.
firms should be aware that these groups and others make it their
business to know them well.

In its most benign form, but nonetheless and important
element, CI allows companies to understand the best practices of
other companies whether or not they are true or direct
competitors. US WEST routinely conducts CI to help its employees
learn not only what the competition is doing, but to scrutinize
matters within the company as well. Such large companies have a
need to secure critical information and distill for key decision
makers. This raises a critical point: It is crucial that CI live
and breathe in a well-structured system where the information
becomes knowledge, and the knowledge made actionable. This means
going to the top of the organization, and this requires buy in
and warrant close attention by senior management.

Making It in a Cutthroat Environment: CI and
Teleconglomeration

The 1996 Telecom Act set into motion a spike in startup
companies and intense merger and acquisition deal flows. It began
with SBC and PacTel, and crossed borders with MCI and British
Telecom. These were significant, high profile, if not rather
obvious, marriages which tended to be friendly with the cards on
the table. The industry is expected to see a great deal more
consolidation of this activity, particularly in the subsectors,
including wireline, wireless, international, large-cap and
merging growth companies such as competitive access providers
(CAPS), satellite companies, and PCS, paging, cellular and
enhanced service platforms such as fax-mail, fax broadcast and
other computer telephony services.

Mergers and acquisitions is a major application for CI,
particularly in the area of due diligence. It is important never
to assume that one’s consulting firm or attorneys have uncovered
all information necessary to put the pieces of a complicated
puzzle together on an organization with whom a relationship is
pending. It is important to drill down deep to uncover every
important aspect of an organization that is not readily
available.

CI is also of great value in trying to understand whether or
not a company is being sought as the target for a mergers and
acquisitions, as well as to determine who in the market should be
your target, friendly or otherwise.

Protecting Your Turf: CI and Market Entrants

The new environment will make CI more important in learning
who is entering your market, who they are targeting, anticipated
investments, with what mix of products and at what pricing
schemes. The market presents a very confusing picture with a
trend toward telecom companies offering a bundle of services and
products that include video and Internet access services. The
consensus among industry insiders is that marketing in the new
competitive environment would require bundling such services as
local, long-distance, video, data, wireless options, and Internet
access at various price points and through different
technologies. How they opt to do this may be influenced by what
their competitors are doing.

One user of CI, Seattle-based Concord Technologies , a leading
provider of fax-mail, fax broadcast and unified messaging
services, is currently working on private labeling such services
for long distance carriers, RBOCS, ISPs and others in addition to
its own consumer customer base. President Chris Moore, president
of Concord Technologies, explains, "We conduct CI for a
number of reasons–from determining who is planning to offer
similar services to determining whether a potential partner would
be able to integrate our technology and are positioned to market
the services. This helps us focus our sales effort and allocate
our resources efficiently."

So how does CI make sense of this? There are thousands of
moving targets, what with technology allowing for CAPs to control
customer bases as small as a modest high-rise apartment complex.
CI can help to answer the following nagging questions:

Getting a lay of the land will not be enough. Telecom firms
and equipment suppliers, large and small, will have to become
adept at anticipating these changes, not just reacting to them.
The information well will become extremely deep, and telecom
firms that hope to protect and gain market share, along with
those who want to enter the fray, will need to have the capacity
to drill very, very deeply over and over again.

Developing and Internal Intelligence Function

CI also is able to provide a broad range of
information across departments:

The Classic Competitive Intelligence Mistake

For many companies, the sum of their "competitive
intelligence" comes from their front-line–technical
support, customer service, production and sales. BellSouth’s Bill
Gulas, in an interview in American Demographics, commented
that "we can learn things from the sales force long before
we see it in print." People in the field often know a
competitor’s latest plans for products, expansion plans and
strategic shifts before upper management, and it is important to
listen to these sources. Depending on this information without
further investigation, however, can be dangerous for several
reasons:

Steve Racz is vice president of Competitive Intelligence
International of Lincolnwood, Ill. For more information, call
(847) 329-8080.