For pure sex appeal, Roger Hough might say his job of gathering “competitive intelligence” is the stuff of James Bond.

But that wouldn’t be right, says the 57-year-old Calgarian. Sherlock Holmes would be more appropriate.

“We have a code of ethics we adhere to,” Hough said last week after addressing a lunchtime gathering at the downtown 400 Club. “We do have a lot of the qualities of a Bond, we just don’t use the same methods.”

Hough is the head of the Calgary chapter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), a burgeoning worldwide non-profit organization that helps CI professionals develop skills in the area of gathering and analysing information. The end result is to give organizations a competitive advantage.

Mike Sturk, Business Edge
Roger Hough says his profession owes more to Sherlock Holmes than to James Bond.

While cinematic spies, and even local “scouts” will use everything at their means — misrepresenting themselves and illegal wiretaps, for example — a CI professional stooping to such tactics would be considered a failure, says Hough.

Headquartered in Virginia, SCIP’s membership is growing at a rate of about 40 per cent a year and now has more than 7,000 members in 45 countries, compared to only a couple hundred people 15 years ago.

“We’re much like an investigative journalist, we just have different goals,” says Hough, a Shell employee for 32 years before he retired a year ago and started his own consulting business, Lowell Professional Services Ltd.

A globetrotter, Hough has worked in South America, the Middle East, the Far East and points in between. He was responsible for research or operations in the upstream oil sector. The last three years at Shell, he was responsible for competitive intelligence.

While CI professionals often do operate on their own, a key component to CI is helping companies develop their own systems.

“At Shell, at first the employees said: ‘No, we can’t do that, it sounds like espionage,’ ” recalls Hough.

It’s a common reaction. Once employees understand the goals, and that everything is legal, chances for success grow. If the company CEO buys in, and assigns a manager to champion the plan, a real competitive intelligence culture can emerge — likely in about two years, says Hough.

SCIP says that almost 85 per cent of the information a company needs to make a business decision is already available in the company. It’s just not accessible.

“Companies have to find out what’s in people’s filing cabinets, and what’s in their heads,” says Hough.

Too often employees overhear things in a bar or a bus, or read something and dismiss it. They don’t recognize its importance.

Shell, says Hough, used two internal methods to circulate information. One method was a standard news group system. The second was the clever use of a software program that sent “snippets” of information to designated people.

When someone found an interesting item, they’d type in a few sentences with assigned key words. Anyone on the system who had registered those key words would get the e-mail message automatically.

“People would be getting useful information from people they didn’t even know,” says Hough.

And knowledge is invaluable.

Robert Flynn, the former CEO and chairman of Nutra Sweet, said in a keynote address to SCIP’s ninth annual conference that CI was worth up to $50 million each year to his company.

Money aside, Hough finds searching out the strengths and weakness of a company to be sheer fun. The information is used for different means.

In the retail sector, you may find that your competitor is researching a new product and needs X Y and Z to complete its project. But if you can acquire Z, or launch a similar product, you might prevent real losses for your company, says Hough.

In another case, a CI professional might help a technology company considering developing a new product. Often the research will show there is a competitor so far ahead in development of the same product that it would be fruitless to proceed.

“It’s much better if you study the playing field first and then choose carefully which areas you want to play in,” he says.

CI professionals have primary sources and secondary sources of information. The primary source is people, contacts who have the “freshest” information. A good CI, says SCIP, has as many contacts as possible.

Secondary sources include the Internet, daily newspapers and magazines, court records and other public documents such as patents and permits.

Calgary is still considered a small community where competitive intelligence, especially in the oilpatch, has been traditionally gathered in places like the Petroleum Club — or through more nefarious ways such as wiretapping offices.

Hough is working for a couple of local clients and spreading the CI message. He and a few others revived a moribund local chapter last July and last week drew 35 people to his 400 Club speech — “The best so far.”

While that gathering might be considered small, Hough looks to the annual SCIP convention as a harbinger.

“It’s just amazing, the breadth of industry that’s represented. The people with the most competitive products are the most active, like pharmaceuticals and telecoms,” he says.

“But you’ll be at lunch talking to John Deere Tractors on one side and SaskPower on the other.

“And I’ll say: ‘Hey SaskPower, what are you doing here?’ And they’ll say: ‘We’re not going to be a utility for that long. We’d better start getting competitive.’ ”

Web Watch:
www.lowell.ab.ca
www.scip.org