Why Knowledge Management and Intuitive Search Are Essential to a Great Competitive Intelligence Solution

• Artificial Intelligence
• Product Focus

The digital age is increasingly defined by a surfeit of data and intelligence, historical and real-time, generated within and outside an organization. When it comes to competitive intelligence as well, business users are often faced with a multiplicity of data sources (news, trends, reports) and siloed insights – making it a continuing challenge to find the right insights for timely action and collaborative decision-making.

Why Most Enterprise Knowledge Portals Fail to Leverage Competitive Intelligence

Despite investments in several competitive intelligence and business insights solutions, legacy knowledge management solutions fail to garner true value due to several reasons:

• Information is hard to find due to siloed systems and weak Search functionality: The primary challenge of a Knowledge Management System is to make information easy to find so that employees do not need to spend time sifting through siloed systems. 46% of employees say it is time-consuming and challenging to find the documents they need (The 2019 Intelligence Information Benchmark Report, 2019), while research shows that professionals spend 18 minutes on average searching for a document. (Tech Crunchies, 2018). This is mostly due to outdated or incomplete search functionalities.
• Redundant and duplicate content creation: Many tools face the issue of documents and content being duplicated over time, often with multiple, non-identical versions of a document existing within the system. This creates a lot of clutter in the system and leads to employee confusion. According to one survey, 83% of employees must recreate existing documents since they cannot find them in their company network (M-Files, 2019).
• Obsolete technology: As technology is evolving, knowledge management systems need to upgrade themselves. Older systems often rely on clunky decentralized architectures that employees avoid using as it simply takes too long to find any information they need.
• Failure to consider end-user needs: Traditional Knowledge Management portals may often not meet the actual/evolving needs of employees when it comes to finding the most relevant information and collaborating with the right people.

How Course5 Compete’s ‘KnowledgeHub’ Empowers Organizations

KnowledgeHub is a knowledge management tool built within Course5 Compete’s Market & Competition Sensing (MCS) platform. The integrated solution helps to set up an Enterprise AI ecosystem that serves to significantly improve and accelerate business decision-making through visibility into market and competitor developments.

KnowledgeHub allows users to access all internal and external reports (industry-wise and competitor-specific) in a single place, aided by an intuitive Search functionality.

Further, KnowledgeHub is integrated with the MCS Insights dashboard and Content Feed (Insights feed from news, blogs, and social media channels) which further allows users to track market trends, industry developments, competitor activity, key product and business updates, industry partnerships, and mergers and acquisitions.

Course5’s KnowledgeHub helps organizations powerfully leverage their data and insights resources for better decision-making and decisive business impact through —

• Single Point-of-Access: KnowledgeHub showcases the entire organizational knowledge in one place through a unified centralized dashboard with customizable widgets that prioritize information related to the user’s chosen topics/companies of interest. This not only enables the user to find relevant information quickly but also removes redundancy. Avoiding ‘effort duplication’ can save companies a lot of time and money; with all documents and information in one place, it is easy for a company to streamline employee efforts. KnowledgeHub also alerts users if there is content duplication in the system.

  Further, KnowledgeHub’s integration with the Content Feed of the MCS platform allows users to access in-depth reports and real-time insights in one place.

• Dynamic Search Capabilities: Advanced Search options with filters (without Boolean searching) in Course5’s KnowledgeHub enable quick search and content prioritization for users. ‘Search’ allows the user to quickly pull up the reports they need or want instead of sifting through layers of information. This saves a huge amount of time for employees who can now focus on more productive tasks and add greater value to the organization.
• Integration of Modern Technologies: Accurate tagging of documents is the basis of a good Search functionality. Course5’s KnowledgeHub leverages artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to enable automated scanning and tagging of documents. The AI-based tagging and report summaries enable users to access the most relevant content in the shortest possible time.
• Competitive Focus: Being part of the Market & Competition Sensing (MCS) platform, KnowledgeHub has an inbuilt focus on competitive landscape analysis, where users can track specific companies and industries. This is enabled through dedicated competitor pages that are customized and built into the module allowing the user to easily access information related to a particular company or a topic through customizable widgets as well as Search.
• Collaboration and Knowledge-sharing: One of the best practices of great knowledge management tools is to enable collaboration and promote a culture of sharing among users in a device- and location-agnostic world. Collaboration and social networking tools within Course5’s KnowledgeHub enable users to like and share reports through email alerts as well as notifications on the platform. A shareable link can also be generated by the user to be shared further with others for viewing the content/report within the platform.