Practical action on Jinfo's Research Focus, from a competitive intelligence manager
Jinfo Blog

By Anja Chemnitz Thygesen

Abstract

We interview a competitive intelligence manager to find out what she and her colleagues found most valuable about the Research Focus, "Source Expertise - What It Means in a Google World", and how it's affected their thinking and future plans.

Item

How are the articles, webinars and Community sessions from the Research Focus, "Source Expertise - What It Means in a Google World", being used?

We spoke to one of our regular participants and subscribers who shared with us what she has learned from the Research Focus and how they will use this in their upcoming strategy work.

Jinfo: What did you find most valuable about the Research Focus?

CI manager: The most important learning from the Research Focus was that it provided context and content around our opinion and what we are working with. We have been struggling to position ourselves, and our expertise together with this Research Focus has put us in a better position to articulate our knowledge and has helped us to plan our next steps forward.

Jinfo: How did it affect your thinking?

CI manager: We are actually in a situation now where we are about to start working on a strategy for our competitive intelligence department and some of the items in this Research Focus will be very helpful to us. Our plan is to identify the different levels of expertise and how we can contribute throughout the organisation.

For instance, we will have to cooperate and reach out to functions in our company beyond those we usually work with. This will be a question of positioning ourselves and finding the relevant stakeholders to interact with.

We have some departments that we don't usually work with - it could be relevant to interact more with them but it's so easy to lean back and be dissatisfied. However, that kind of attitude will not solve anything.

What really works is to reach out and show the stakeholders what you can do. In a way it's also a question of being more strategic.

Jinfo: What will be the practical next steps?

CI manager: We have not yet decided whether we will specialise more in certain areas but we have some good input from the Research Focus to bring into our work on this. We'll firm up those decisions as part of our strategy work.

About five years ago we started the journey to transform our competitive intelligence department. We decided to be more strategic in our approach and identified our first set of goals with a plan which we could then tick off as we reached the different steps.

It's been a very satisfying journey and it has taken us to where we are today. Now we just have to start working on the next set of goals and will certainly be looking at the material from this Research Focus when doing that. What we have definitely learned over the years is that if you have a goal and plan and you follow the plan then you can really achieve a lot of things.

The main lessons learned from this three-month Research Focus, plus a thematic index to all content published, are included in the report Insights and Actions from the Research Focus "Source Expertise - What It Means in a Google World", visit the Research Focus page to get your copy.

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