March, 2009

by Raoul Farcot, Vice President, Cipher Systems

See also Jean Graef's commentary on this article and SharePoint Thesaurus Web Part

My company, Cipher Systems, is a competitive intelligence consultancy. Part of our work is integrating our proprietary competitive intelligence software system into organizations across industries. During our 12 years of operation, we have seen increasing interest in how Microsoft’s SharePoint platform might be used to assist with our clients’ competitive intelligence technology needs.

The objective of this article is to assess the compatibility of Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 architecture and its key functional components with the primary user requirements of competitive intelligence professionals across industry sectors. To do so, we begin by assessing the key user requirements and key deliverables produced by competitive intelligence (“CI”) professionals across corporate and institutional organizations. We then align these requirements with the key functional components of SharePoint 2007 in order to identify the gaps and synergetic areas between SharePoint architecture and the CI professional requirements.

PART I: CI requirements and deliverables
Cipher has found that the responsibilities and key deliverables produced by CI professionals are generally conditioned by two main factors: status and industry sector.

Status within the organization
Part-time professionals/researchers who share time with another corporate function such as Marketing Research, Sales Support or Strategic Planning will have a tendency to focus on tactical collection assignments such as compiling competitor profiles or publishing newsletters, since they may not have the resources or the time to produce longer term/analytical deliverables. Conversely, full time CI professionals/research managers who have access to greater resources and budget can focus on the implementation of strategic and analytical CI deliverables such as market assessments, product launch analysis or mergers and acquisitions due diligence.

Industry sector
CI Professionals operating in the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology sectors are primarily focused on monitoring the product pipelines and clinical trial activities of leading competitors while those in the Telecommunications industry are focused on benchmarking the operational footprints, cost structure and product offering of leading competitors in or around specific MSAs (metropolitan statistical areas). There are generally additional workflows and deliverables that are associated with these types of industry-specific tasks, which are not discussed here.

CI tasks
Regardless of their status or industry, we have seen that most CI professionals undertake the following tasks:

1. Monitor the news and publish weekly/monthly competitive/marketing intelligence newsletters;
2. Monitor, benchmark, and profile key competitors and compile text-based competitor profiles in a matrix styled template;
3. Address daily ad hoc CI queries and produce reports for internal users;
4. Set up and manage CI teams and projects;
5. Create and manage Key Intelligence Topics (KITs) and other strategic research reports for decision makers.

PART II: SharePoint assessment
Overall, SharePoint 2007 is primarily a server-based document management platform outfitted with basic collaboration features, including; a discussion board, a contact database and a Wiki management capability. Microsoft also added an RSS feed manager and a Web publishing functionality to its 2007 version to allow users to import, manage, and share external Web content with other site users. 

From a general architectural standpoint, SharePoint appears somewhat “disjointed” to the average user and is organized as a content management “Tool Kit” rather than workflow-driven software. Some of the key functional components available in SharePoint 2007 include:

• Document management features to store and index a wide range of content across sites, including: reports, Wiki pages, forms, pictures, and data connection;
• Web publishing features to create and publish web pages/web page libraries across various SharePoint sites and workspaces;  
• Collaboration features to post and manage announcements, contacts, and discussion boards;
• Project management features to assign and manage tasks, track issues and deadlines (Calendar);
• Directory management features to create custom list views in datasheets and import their respective content into MS Excel.

Security issues
It is also important to note that SharePoint 2007 presents a number of potential security flaws that would need to be addressed by corporate organizations before they use SharePoint to host and manage Competitive Intelligence data:

• The default security model of SharePoint 2007 allows all site users to have read access to all documents posted in all sites.
• The “centralized repository” configuration of SharePoint 2007 increases its vulnerability for the potential hacking of sensitive corporate data, e.g., salaries, phone numbers, customer lists, passwords, strategic plans, etc.
• SharePoint’s outward facing servers can be easily scanned/hacked via Google/ further network mapping can be accomplished with popular security tools such as "nmap".
• SharePoint Regular Expression Search Tools allow security analysts to query the entirety of a SharePoint site's MSWord documents for sensitive data; although, it can also be used by hackers.
• As SharePoint’s framework grows, vulnerabilities in code increase - SharePoint encourages a plug-and-play mentality with the allowance of module-code; as such, varying code allows multiple breach points to the site, server, and increased risk to users.
• Source code by Microsoft: will have same vulnerabilities for all MS products (memory leaks, buffer overflow vulnerabilities, XSS vulnerabilities, etc) - will also suffer from the same timeliness of Microsoft patching services.

Comparative assessment
The following provides a comparative breakdown of the leading user requirements with some of the key features available in SharePoint 2007. In summary, our comparative assessment indicates that SharePoint 2007 out-of-the-box features only provide partial support for the following user requirement categories and key deliverables:

• Monitoring news and producing newsletters;
• Monitoring and Profiling key competitors and compiling text-based competitor profiles in a matrix styled template;
• Addressing internal queries and produce ad hoc CI reports;
• Producing and managing KITs or other strategic reports produced by CI professionals. 

On the other hand, our assessment does show that SharePoint 2007 configuration and out-of-the-box functionality is better suited to support the following CI user requirement categories and deliverables:

• Creating and updating matrix based competitor profiles / benchmark analysis;
• Managing CI teams and projects.

Functional assessment
The following provides a comparative breakdown of SharePoint 2007 functionality with the primary user requirements of CI professionals:

Conclusion
SharePoint 2007 features a series of tools and services which are directly compatible with the primary user requirements of CI professionals. However, SharePoint 2007 requires a significant amount of programming and technical customizations in order to fully meet the key CI user requirements and deliverables listed in the first section of this report. 

Some of the key factors limiting SharePoint’s ability to meet the primary user requirements of CI professionals include:

• SharePoint is primarily configured for power or technically savvy users and would require the implementation of a user friendly interface in order to be effectively applied by CI professionals.