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Jinfo Blog

6th March 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Companies spend vast sums protecting their intellectual property when it would be more cost-effective simply to let people have it. That’s the proposition behind a new report from Deloitte – and it raises all sorts of implications for the way researchers gather intelligence and what they choose to pay for. ‘Up to half the data assets that companies maintain and defend are neither needed nor used,’ says the article in the half yearly Deloitte Review. ‘Many efforts to safeguard intellectual property are ineffectual or even counterproductive – depressing the value of the very thing they are trying to protect,’ the article continues, the problem being that ‘ most companies do not distinguish between crucial and useless data’ (http://digbig.com/5bbejd). Deloitte has a number of security-related answers for this, partly around questioning why particular types of information are collected at all. But the main proposition of ‘Lock it up or set it free’ is that you can save yourself a lot of trouble by simply letting people have it. This is partly because competitors are going to get it anyway. ‘Manufacturers may find protecting their formulas both expensive and ineffectual, since reverse-engineering by competitors has become commonplace,’ the article says. There’s plenty of other evidence to support this. In a LiveWire posting last year, Udo Hohlfeld pointed out that 70-80% of what you needed to know about the competition was publicly available and the rest could be deduced using business analysis techniques (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22441) – and more recently, security specialist Sophos warned of the corporate dangers of people simply reverse engineering LinkedIn profiles (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28058). So if it’s increasingly out there anyway, why should researchers have to pay for it – or at least pay as much as they do? This issue has been exercising Outsell analyst Chuck Richard, who notes that web scraping and entity extraction technologies are letting disruptive start-ups quickly build and structure massive contacts and profiles databases that compete with the manual, editorially generated ones. Add in user-generated profile and contact information resources from the likes of LinkedIn or Jigsaw, and the old hands like Dun & Bradstreet, Experian or OneSource look increasingly vulnerable, Richard implies. Working on the principle of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’, D&B has acquired one such disruptive upstart, Generate (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e11593 for some background on this) – but Richard concludes that new competitors can compete aggressively on price until quality starts to establish new rankings in the eyes of customers (http://digbig.com/5bbeje – Outsell subscribers only). If companies do become more selective about what they really have to keep secret, that further increases the opportunities for doing it yourself. Or at the very least, for taking a long hard look at who you get to do it for you.

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