Market intelligence - all change since 2009?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Much will have moved on since the Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA) did its last Market Intelligence Survey in 2009.  But that earlier report included plenty of heartening findings for infopros – and early warning for decision makers too – so contributing to the 2011 survey sounds like a good idea.

GIA defines “market intelligence” as encompassing both competitive and business intelligence, and some of its 2009 findings were stark.  As many as 94% of the surveyed companies sometimes made vital business decisions without the support of proper market intelligence, it found – while 65% did so “quite frequently”.

The number of “efficient” decision makers was up slightly last time, according to the online poll of over 700 respondents (register here to see the 2009 report).  But so too was the number of “inefficient” decision makers – which suggests that there are opportunities to be seized by astute information professionals.

They may even be knocking at an open door.  LiveWire noted that respondents to the joint Dow Jones and Special Libraries Association Bad Info survey last summer – over half of whom were classic end-users – felt that professional researchers were by far the least likely to fall prey to bad information.

There are plenty of other straws in the wind for infopros at the moment too – some of them caught by a recent LiveWire posting on quick (and slower) wins.  They include a forecast from Gartner that the global market for business intelligence software will increase by 9.7% in 2011. 

At the start of this year, Gartner also highlighted four developments which it believed would change business intelligence and analytics.  They were: growing use of handheld devices; increasingly sophisticated analytic functions; increased spending on system integrators as opposed to software vendors; and more integration of collaborative and social software into decision making environments.

Back in 2009, a quarter of GIA respondents said they weren’t satisfied with the level of integration of market intelligence to any of the surveyed business processes – so a key finding of the 2011 survey should be how much perceived improvement there’s been.  Since 2009 we’ve seen no lack of new software-based workflow solutions – most recently, for example, a new dashboard from business content provider Northern Light for its SinglePoint strategic research portals, to deliver crucial time-sensitive content to decision makers. 

All the same, GIA cautioned against the view that the solution to information logistics was necessarily a technical one.  “Software tools are important, but at the heart of a good intelligence system are always culture, process and deliverables,” it said.

Should be music to the ears of infopros.  So if you’re interested in adding your own views to GIA’s new 2011 survey, you have until the end of March to do so.

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