PROGRAMA DE EMERGENCIA SOCIAL

A checklist was used in addition to the interviews, asking the respondents about CI analyst deployment in firms. A summary of their organisational structure for CI is noted in Table 5.6 below.

Table 5.6: Summary Organisational Structure for CI in Firms from Checklist

Firm’s Analyst (q4) Department CI unit and

Organisational Structure Swisscom 2010 strategic analyst Group Strategy & Steering

Strategy and business development, decentral Swisscom 2010 department analyst Various departments

Swisscom 2010 strategic analyst Strategy and Business Development

Sunrise 2010 strategic analyst Strategy & Business Intelligence

Strategy and business intelligence, central Orange 2010 strategic analyst Corporate Strategy &

Regulatory Affairs

Strategy and regulatory affairs, central

Cablecom 2010 operational analyst Strategy

Strategy and business intelligence, decentral Cablecom 2010 strategic analyst Business Intelligence

Cablecom executive assistant of CEO

Marketing, strategy, network, customer care

Cablecom employed CI analysts in the strategy department for operational tasks and other CI analysts were placed in a decentralised way in several departments, liaising with the centre. The analyst at Cablecom noted how firm had gained from decentralised information exchange:

“During the crisis time of Cablecom we saw that there is a silo thinking […], and we tried and we have succeeded breaking up these silos, and share information much more frequently, much more happily between departments.” (Analyst 7, Cablecom, date of interview 29/12/2010)

Cablecom’s Swiss CI teams were in close contact to the headquarters in Amsterdam.

The strategic analysts linked systems manually, there were portals for communication, and customer care, systems and links lacked. Analyst 8 said:

“We have a special portal for customer care.” (Analyst 8, Cablecom, date of interview 29/12/2010)

The operational analysts worked ad hoc on competitor information and used comprehensive competitive update report. He explained:

“I send our competitor information to part of the middle management and to the senior management, and there are of course some regular meetings, within these meetings, if necessary they discuss our performance and the market performance, and based on these meetings we have some decisions.” (Analyst 6, Cablecom, date of interview 10/11/2010)

Cablecom’s operational systems were Clarify and MS Office to gather, process, and prepare information for decision-making. A management information system was used for internal information, some modelling for forecasts in Excel; and the knowledge management system was relied on for data for marketing decisions in Clarify.

Analytical tools for decision-support included budget plans, benchmarks of

performance, and competitive updates. Cablecom’s operational analyst mainly used MS Office but accessed the management information system. Overall Cablecom had an ad hoc approach at operational level, while using a more systematic procedure for planning strategic CI projects and generating weekly KPI information.

In contrast, the analysts from Swisscom reported some central staff but employed CI analysts in key departments, showing a decentralised pattern.:

“The whole thing is decentralised to be close to the (internal) customers. There are only few centralised issues as for example Forrester, Gartner, which is centrally bought.” (Analyst 3, Swisscom, date of interview 14/04/2010)

The management information system was linked with data mining generating automatic reports, and weekly or monthly updates, as the analyst explained:

“What surely is connected is the Management Information System with all issues coming from the data mining, so the systems generate automatic reports, and weekly or monthly updates. But the other issues not containing just digits are as far as I know not interlinked.” (Analyst 2, Swisscom, date of interview 14/04/2010)

System links were established to facilitate information transfer. This appeared especially helpful for decentralised teams.

Sunrise organised their analysts centrally – Sunrise’s analyst explained during the interview that CI was organised in one team (central) when stating:

“In the past we had some kind of competitor intelligence distributed over the company because every department or every unit they had to look after our competitors, but when I started in Sunrise we centralised this kind of information.” (Analyst 4, Sunrise, date of interview 01/10/2010).

In contrast, Sunrise’s competitor information was centrally structured depending on the information. Their analyst, who seemed proud about that, explained:

“Sunrise [in 2008] we centralised this kind of information. … It’s more or less centralised and whenever somebody has or wants competitor information they call us because we are guarding such information.” (Analyst 4, Sunrise, date of interview 01/10/2010)

The analyst was responsible for this organisational change. Nevertheless, it was a small team of analysts and systems were not developed other than Knowledge Management.

Processing competitor information was through the analyst with constant information flows with specialised departments.

In contrast to Swisscom and to Sunrise, in the Orange case, there was just one centrally located CI analyst (the respondent) coping with CI activities on a part time basis.

Orange placed the analyst centrally in the department of corporate strategy and regulatory affairs. He reported the need to adapt products to government regulations.

Concerning organisational structure Orange challenged itself to have a balance. The analyst answered the question, if they were decentralised as follows:

“Yes, that’s a reasonable assumption, but we are not decentralised for the centrally located topics. That is why we challenge us to have a balance. We have centrally located stuff, to match what is done centrally and what is not done centrally.” (Analyst 5, Orange, date of interview 20/10/2010)

They were decentralised for specialised topics, centralised for centrally located topics.

Analytical tasks and communicating competitor intelligence were tailored for centralised and decentralised issues. However, Orange employed only one-part time intelligence analyst – he relied on a central CI department for Orange Switzerland through a powerful portal and strong data access procedures, but there was no local analysis capability. Excel lists were developed about events, trends and tendencies, and ad hoc analyses.

Overall, the patterns show that all firms had CI analysts placed close to strategic units.

Inspecting the number of CI analysts, it becomes clear that Sunrise and Orange could not be decentralised, due to numbers (Sunrise: 2, Orange: 1), while Swisscom and Cablecom noted a high number of analysts in different departments in positons to focus on critical CI issues. Figure 5.1 shows preliminary team organisation patterns for CI activities.

Figure 5.1: Overview of how CI teams are Organised

A centrally performed CI Process is not as flexible as a decentralised process (see Trumbach and Elofson 2007; Dong et al. 2012) but this may be linked to stage of development – Sunrise and Orange reported their CI processes to be at an early stage – their analyses and systems were adapted in a best fit at firm level to their needs. Sunrise also had centrally organised CI, but reported close contact with frontline managers – for instance, Sunrise’s weekly brainstorming meetings provide contact with managers and the necessary feedback to develop their CI Process.