Bottom Line Competitive Intelligence

Rating:
Summary: A good. but not excellent, bottom line
Review: This is a most interesting and unique CI book. It tries to do what most other books only address in passing - that is, to clarify the bottom-line impact of CI. This question is one that a number of my clients have had over the years and is a difficult question to answer. McGonagle and Vella provide what is one of the most descriptive and thorough processes I've seen yet for dealing with the "value" of CI - and that is no easy feat. I'm not certain they truly identified CI's bottom line value - and I don't think their discussion will allow us to generate a clean ROI number for example, but they did cover the wide range of factors that impact whether CI is useful to a company or not, and for that alone they deserve much praise.

The book, like the authors' previous efforts I've seen - and I note that they've written a good number of them through the years, is carefully written and systematic. That is something I both appreciate, and also find a bit frustrating, at the same time. I appreciate their step-wise walk in the chapters through the types of intelligence - active and defensive, as well as their lengthy discussion of sources - of which chapter 6 on sources is a good example of the benefits and drawbacks of their style. My frustration arises not from the discussion itself, but in the manner in which it is laid out as lengthy lists in the form of chapters - it does not make for easy reading but rather kind of a guidebook to be used on an as-needed basis during research. They also have pages and pages of charts - an example is the back half of chapter 4 on the divisions of CI, which I normally like, except that these charts look like a consumers buyers guide, go on for several pages at a time, and don't always have the headings running across the top of the pages or the codes on each page, making them hard to follow and interpret.

Having said all these things, this is a valuable effort - and will add to the bottom-line of any practitioner's understanding of the field. I think they've mostly missed out helping us better understand the financial return of CI that most execs I speak to want to know, but have helped us better understand its return in terms of the utility that CI practices can generate for an organization.

I'd recommend this book to experienced practitioners, and to individuals who lead CI efforts in their corporations. It is not as useful for beginners in the field, who would value more from one of these authors' previous efforts like the "Internet Age of CI," for example.