Fuld & Company's Competitive Intelligence Blog

Groundbreaking Intranet Study Launched

Fuld & Company and MIT Sloan School Professor Seek Companies to Help Develop Intranet Intelligence Gold Standards

Cambridge, MA – October 19, 2000 – Fuld & Company has joined forces with John Rockart, founding Director of the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Information Systems Research, to launch a study to examine the effectiveness of corporate intranets. The Fuld-MIT team is currently inviting companies around the world to join the study, which will examine the use of intranets and how they capture and convey critical market intelligence to managers throughout an organization.

For the first time, a study will examine the critical effectiveness of corporate intranets and how they influence management decision making. In particular, the Fuld-MIT team will examine how corporate intranets are linked to a company’s overall strategy, how the organization supports its intranet, the features of intranets that make them effective drivers of strategic and tactical intelligence and where they add value to the corporation. The group will examine issues surrounding cost savings, competitive advantage achieved through competitive intelligence, as well as other value-added areas.

“Companies are likely wasting billions of dollars a year on their intranets, specifically as they apply to improving the critical use of intelligence by management,” states Leonard M. Fuld, president and founder of Fuld & Company, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based intelligence consulting firm. This year alone, corporations will spend nearly $64 billion on intranets worldwide and are expected to spend $200 billion per year by the end of the decade on hardware, software and related services to support intranets, according to Gartner, Forrester and a host of technology forecasting services.

“The use of internet technology to improve business-to-business and business-to-consumer capabilities for organizations of all sizes dominates the headlines today,” says Rockart. “The same technology, if used effectively internally, however, can provide seamless access to information and significant benefits. At present, we see a wide range of use of the intranet with little knowledge of how to gain the best payoff. We need to study what leads to success in this area.”

According to a recent Fuld study, Intranets could actually hinder a company’s competitiveness if not applied effectively. There has been an explosion of competitive – or business – intelligence intranet services over the past five to six years. Many corporations offer multiple sites, serving different business units or divisions. Because many of these home pages have emerged through grass-roots efforts, few of their creators have shared and compared their development efforts. Each “competitive intelligence home page” likely represents hundreds of hours of development time, thousands of yearly maintenance hours and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in other development costs and software fees. To date, the effectiveness of such sites has not been measured. By “flying blind,” many of these site developers avoid (or are unable to ask) questions, such as: Does a particular site meet the needs of its users? Does a site actually enable decision-makers to improve or accelerate their decision? Or, do the sites merely aggregate data pools, otherwise adding little value?

Fuld and Rockart are currently inviting a limited cadre of companies to participate in the study, which will be conducted over the next few months. Findings of the survey will be released by Spring 2001. A closed-door conference for all participants of the study will also be held.

The study will be led by Leonard Fuld, Ken Sawka and John Rockart. Fuld, known as the “father of competitive intelligence,” is a noted author and pioneer in the field of competitive intelligence. Sawka is Vice President of Fuld & Co. and Director of its Intelligence Systems and Consulting practice. Rockart was named as one of the top ten MIS consultants and non-fiction winner of the Computer Press Association Book of the Year Award by Information Week, and is best known for the development of critical success factors for initiating the field of executive support systems. He has written for the Harvard Business Review as well as numerous business and technical publications.

For more information on this study, please contact Leonard Fuld or Ken Sawka at 617-492-5900.

Fuld & Company
Based in Cambridge, Mass., with offices in London, England and Geneva, Switzerland, Fuld & Company specializes in providing business intelligence consulting services, and has designed intelligence processes for numerous corporations worldwide. Leonard Fuld is a recognized worldwide as an expert and author in the field of competitive intelligence.

Other free intelligence tools found at www.fuld.com include an Internet Intelligence Index, with links to 600 intelligence-related internet sites; an Intelligence Dictionary, with hyperlinks to related terms and websites; an interactive Intelligence Forum, where questions are fielded by Fuld & Company experts, excerpts from Leonard Fuld’s acclaimed book, The New Competitor Intelligence, and an Intelligence Organizer.

Novartis CEO Finds Success in Biopharmaceuticals Through Insight, Opportunity, Expertise and the Internet

Competitive Intelligence Can Identify Market Opportunities

Cambridge, MA – October 3, 2000 – Positioning Novartis AG as an innovative company that responds to customer needs, CEO Daniel Vasella has enabled the newly merged company to brand itself as a global leader in the healthcare arena as well as the life sciences.

In an exclusive interview with competitive intelligence guru Leonard Fuld on the Fuld Competitive Intelligence Center (www.factiva.com) during the month of October, Dr. Vasella demonstrates how he and others at Novartis roll up their sleeves and dig deeply into market data – from scanning the Internet to combing other ends of the real, not vitual, market place. Vasella addresses the multiple challenges in product development and how his company (a merger of Ciba Geigy and Sandoz) uses competitive intelligence to succeed.

The Fuld Competitive Intelligence Center provides business professionals, from managers to CEOs, with powerful company, industry and trend analysis tools that help them efficiently compile, evaluate and act on competitive intelligence and make timely, strategic decisions.

Competitive intelligence at Novartis comes from public sources, publications, symposia, researcher networks and the Internet. While competitors can tap into the same data, Vasella notes that not everyone has the same access. Furthermore, analysts in his competitive intelligence group draw a picture of what is happening, determine how relevant it is and distribute the information to the right people.

“What does it all mean if you don’t have the people who are good enough to act with the information?” Vasella said. “A lot depends not on the CEO, but on what kind of people and culture you have in your organization. How entrepreneurial are they and can they act fast? That is something the CEO alone cannot do.”

Ideally, he would like to have the kind of development intelligence that helps Novartis terminate research programs early, when there is no chance of success.

“I would also like to know what kinds of studies and designs others are using, how advanced they are, and how we can beat them in time-to-market,” Vasella said. “These are the kind of R&D related issues we’d like to know.”

Addressing Novartis’ new emphasis on pharmaceuticals, he said that successful drug research and development depends on insight, opportunity, expertise of the people who implement the programs, their ownership and then persistence.

Factivaä, a leader in delivering and integrating global news and business information on corporate desktops around the world, launched Fuld’s groundbreaking competitive intelligence resource in the award-winning Ask Dow Jones section of Dow Jones Interactive.

Each month, the site features an exclusive interview with a top CEO or other well known executive. The interviews, all conducted by Fuld, uncover each executive’s competitive strategies, challenges and successes. Already featured have been Robert Crandall, the former chairman & CEO of American Airlines, Herb Baum, president of Hasbro Inc., oil magnate T. Boone Pickens, Pitney Bowes CEO Michael Critelli and Symantec CEO John Thompson.

Besides exclusive CEO interviews, the Fuld Competitive Intelligence Center offers a Competitive Intelligence Primer and an interactive introduction to competitive intelligence basics – covering topics such as information analysis, research techniques, global information interpretation and competitive intelligence program organization. In addition, the site’s Strategic Intelligence Organizer provides a complete checklist of information revealing the best competitive practices used by successful companies.

Fuld & Company
Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., with offices in London and Geneva, Fuld & Company is an international leader and pioneer in the field of competitive intelligence. The company specializes in providing research and analysis to the financial services, utility/energy, manufacturing, high technology, telecommunications, healthcare and consumer product sectors. In addition, across all of these industry sectors, Fuld & Company assists corporations in the development of robust strategic intelligence programs and processes. Leonard Fuld, often regarded as the father of competitive intelligence, is a worldwide recognized expert and author in the field of competitive intelligence. Since founding Fuld & Co. in 1979, the firm has completed more than 3,000 competitive intelligence assignments and count more than half the Fortune 500 as its clients.
Additional information can be found at http://www.fuld.com