Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence - Now Online

Introduction

Every day, competition drives the world of business, as firms compete for resources, revenue and the relentless quest to outperform one another. At the same time consumers are demanding more and better choices in the products and services they buy and economic conditions flux through the business cycle, firms are intensely studying one another's capabilities, plans for the future and benchmarking themselves against their top competitors.

My name is Arik Johnson - I'm managing director at the competitive intelligence outsourcing bureau and best practices institute, Aurora WDC, which I founded in 1995. This is my new Weblog, which I'm tentatively calling "Competitive Intelligence" (although that name may evolve over oncoming weeks and months). This is a writing experiment that I've been trying to find time to initiate for a while now - and, I'm excited to see how the boundaries of this subject matter take shape. If you're interested in further info about me, see my biography at the company's Web site.

Today, after far more planning and procrastination than I'd ever thought reasonable, I have at long last launched my latest writing project - the "Competitive Intelligence" Weblog. What a way to spend the summer! It took most of the June and July, in fact, researching tools and comparing what I hoped to achieve with what was already available... trying to take a few best practices from those blogs that seemed to do things right, regardless of their domain of study. So, finally, I spent this past weekend installing and configuring a MoveableType Weblogging system on my firm's primary Web server - www.AuroraWDC.com - and then trying my hand at as much CSS and HTML hacking as I could figure out for the layout of the site itself.

Motivation and Purpose

There are several factors in my starting up Competitive Intelligence, and not all of them are completely lacking in self-interest; however, foremost in my mind, and maybe most ironic in an age of global hypercompetition, I've found there remains a relative vacuum of op-ed style analysis of matters affecting competitiveness and intelligence methods in modern business (at least with any frequency and timeliness) from the mainstream business press.

Moving forward, I'm hoping to look at various direct and tangential subjects - ranging from current events in the global marketplace to cases from business history to hot topics in fields related to competition, strategy, business research and analysis, lessons to be learned from other sectors (like government, non-profits and education) and the myriad sub-domains CI concerns itself with every day.

If you'd like to be notified of all entries, look for the notify section of this page to enter your email address and we'll forward the whole entry to you as I put them up, or get the RSS feed. If you'd prefer to just receive blog highlights once a month, then sign up for Aurora's Recon CI Newsletter.

With that, join me in the days ahead to explore Competitive Intelligence, share mutual insights and create a new commentary on the broader subjects of risk, opportunity, success and failure in the modern business enterprise.

Cheers,

- Arik