More than 100,000 student records were accidentally made available online by The Princeton Review, an educational support services provider. The discovery was exposed by a competitor as it conducted competitive intelligence research.
The competing company alerted the New York Times to the problem rather than The Princeton Review. A bit of “Black PR” makes the competitive arena more interesting.
I often analyse job ads when looking at a target company and one type of ad raises a red flag indicating poor management.
Whenever I see an employment ad for a person who can multitask, I know the poor soul who gets the job will have an inept and incompetent boss — a boss who does not have a broad view of his firm’s operational requirements and goals. Multitasking might be fine for computer systems, but it is a stupid concept to apply to people.
This manager does not see enough of his operation to understand what efforts need coordinating in harmony with resources at his disposal. Without a broad overview, he cannot hope to prioritize and redirect his resources according to the constraints that commitments of his resources place on operations. He just wants people to multitask!
This manager, operating with blinders on, will never identify critical resources and prioritize the rapid redeployment of key people. He will not function well in an environment where resources must be shared. He will not enjoy the success that truly maximizing the use of his resources would bring. He will just vainly look for another poor soul who can multitask better.
When I see this type of ad, I know that I have found a weakness in the opposition’s organisation.
Competitive Intelligence is more than research skills. It is communication and diplomacy. It is about building mass support for what must be done. If you read Crossing the Chasm from the perspective of selling an approaching disruptive reality, then you will enhance your ability to identify those who will accept your bad news and support it.
Competitive Intelligence is also about project management. One must understand what military doctrine calls Economy of Force and Concentration of Force. In Competitive Intelligence projects, your reserves are the time buffers added to non-critical tasks to prevent impeding the critical work without adding waste. Critical Chain : A Business Novel represents a good primer to critical chain project management methodology. This methodology is particularly applicable to Competitive Intelligence projects.
Starting a competitive intelligence research project, an investigation, or due diligence research usually entails a detailed look at the corporate filings, share structure, and accounts of the target or subject company.
On the island of Great Britain, there are two separate registries, one for England and Wales, and another for Scotland. Both of these are operated by Companies House. The accounts and filings for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland take the same format.
On the island of Ireland, the Northern Ireland Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment of the Northern Ireland Government, (DETINI) houses the corporate filings and accounts. Corporate filings in the Republic of Ireland may be obtained online from the Companies Registration Office.
On the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey the corporate filings are handled at the Jersey Financial Services Commission and the Guernsey Registry. Jersey and Guernsey are tax havens, and companies incorporated there do not normally file accounts.
The Isle of Man is a tax haven, and companies incorporated there do not normally file accounts. The Companies Registry holds corporate filings, and is part of the Financial Supervision Commission. Continue reading ‘Corporate Filing Searches on the British Islands’
A good example is the NNDB Network Mapper. The NNDB Network Mapper contains relationship data for over 32,000 individuals and organizations and allows you to view their connections with a high degree of granularity.
Using visual tools like NNDB will make competitive intelligence and investigations easier to manage as this type of software becomes more refined and common.
Franchises identify themselves in the marketplace by using a common name and trademark. Each user of the name purchases a franchise which allows the franchisee the right to use the name. This is where the fun begins.
The franchisee will be a company or partnership with rights to use the name. In Canada, the right to use the name will normally be filed as a Business Name Registration. This allows a person, company, or partnership to operate under a name other than his or its proper name.
Now imagine you have a franchise at 123 Main Street in some Ontario town or city. How do you distinguish it from all the other franchises using the same business name?
In Ontario, OnCorp will allow you to view a list of all the business name registrations along with the recorded addresses.
A mouse click in the check-box next to the registration with the correct address will get you the Business Name Registration, and that will tell you the name of the company or partnership that owns that franchise location.
As I surf, Alexa Sparky provides each site’s traffic rank and a historical chart of traffic in the bottom right-hand corner. This is useful for evaluating the reliability of the data on the site. This tool helps evaluate sources without being influenced by elaborate Web site designs.
Of course Alexa Sparky is far from perfect, it does not provide a full ranking, but it can help you identify better content. For instance, a site that is ranked in the mid-six-figure range has a large following. A site like Danger Room with a mid-three-figure ranking has an enormous following, larger that many newspapers and newsstand magazines.
I first noticed this on the SCIP news site.
Competitive Intelligence Club Spreads its Wings
June 30, 2008
Initially a network of competitive intelligence specialists working in France’s aeronautics industry, the Commission pour l’Information en Entreprises (ClpE) gradually expanding its remit to new areas like lobbying, security and crisis management. Bolted on to the Association Aeronautique et Astronautique de France (3AF), CIpE boasts a membership of 80 officials in charge of business intelligence in around 40 big French companies and organizations.
An interesting study that found that 87% of data breaches are the result of incompetence and carelessness.
Another study shows that a large disconnect between the executives tasked with protecting customer data and marketing departments, which use the data for advertising purposes or share it with third parties.
a third of marketing execs said they don’t place any limits on the data they share with third parties, such as e-mail marketing agencies or online advertisers. By contrast, 75% of privacy officers believe that their companies limit the sharing of customer data.
These findings are a good reminder that asking questions will yield useful data that they shouldn’t divulge. It’s all in how you ask the question.
A survey in Britain and the United States found that eavesdropping in public places was common. Nearly two out of five British professionals (35 per cent) and 34 per cent of Americans surveyed said they had caught sight of other people’s sensitive company documents.
Information exchanged during supposedly private business conversations were also used by others for their own advantage, according to survey findings.
The survey, TWO THIRDS OF TRAVELLING BRITS HEAR CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION LEAKED BY FRAZZLED BLACKBERRY GENERATION, has an obvious bias. Regus Group plc, the company that commissioned the survey, sells virtual offices, and meeting rooms to clients on a contract basis. Regus caters to small businesses, large companies with few representatives in a given location, and frequent travellers. However, the results seem to match my experience regarding the behaviour of many business people.
If you conduct business in inappropriate places, then expect somebody to listen in on what is transpiring. If you work on company documents in public, then expect somebody to look over your shoulder. Conducting business in public makes surveillance of your activities legal and ethical. If the guy sitting at the next table in a restaurant reports to a competitor what he sees and hears during your business meeting, don’t complain, you gave away the information, and a competitor will use it to advantage.
Dumpster-diving — going through trash bins in hopes of finding paper records with valuable information like customer names or future product plans — is alive and well in the age of USB flash drives and portable music players.
An excellent article from Robert L. Scheier in Computerworld, on Monday, December 17, 2007 entitled, Dumpster-diving for e-data, discusses the risk factors and offers some solutions.
Popular Mechanics offers advice on how to destroy hard drives.
The French have a reputation for aggressive intelligence operations to support their economic and industrial needs. They are acting in their own interests, as Charles de Gaulle said, “The French do not have friends. We French have interests.” . Their actions have a historical precedent as you can see from some of the previous articles about the French during the Industrial Revolution. A review of recent history further explains the French approach to Competitive Intelligence.
If you need to interview current or former employees of a company for competitive intelligence or investigative purposes, then Google is the first resource to consult.
This simple search will help you find employees of a given company:
Acme Company “employed by” OR “work for”
This might be tedious to sort through the results as ” work for” may turn up a lot of irrelevant hits. Try this with IBM as the company name and you will see what I mean.
To find references to a person’s employment try this:
“john smith” “employed by” OR “work for”
With either of these searches you might want to add a country, province, or city to limit the number of hits returned.
An excellent article at Knowledge Is Power about using a blog to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about competitors and manage the spin on news about its rivals while usually reporting positively about your own employer.
Another post about Black PR defines this as distinct from a disinformation campaign.
By now you have heard of the secret intelligence files left on a commuter train in England.
Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the powerful Home Affairs select committee told the BBC: “Such confidential documents should be locked away…they should not be read on trains.”
This should be a reminder to the private sector regarding trade secrets.
A trade secret is not protected by a Patent, Trademark, or Industrial Design. A trade secret is confidential and proprietary information that you protect because of its commercial value and the competitive advantage that it produces for your company.
Exposing a trade secret in public by working on a critical document on an airplane, leaving a trade secret on a commuter train, or exposing it in an proposal, may eliminate the confidential nature of the data, and once you do that, you have, by definition, given up protecting it, therefore, it is not a trade secret that you can claim as proprietary — your former trade secret moves into the public domain for all to see and use.
As a competitive intelligence practitioner, I often find former trade secrets loose in the public domain due to irresponsible security practices. If the owner does not protect the trade secret, it ceases to be confidential and proprietary data, and is likely to become somebody else’s competitive advantage, or worse still, it might become a standard practice for an entire industry.
