In my previous article on how the Food Network's "Chopped" program is like being a CIO, I mentioned the mystery ingredients CIOs must navigate: time pressure, resources, adaptability, use of evaluation criteria, and threat of being chopped. But what if a chef prepares an excellent dish, and his competitor prepares a better one? CIOs face that threat as well.

How can a CIO learn about what the competition is doing? And how can a CIO use this information to improve IT and communicate how well IT is doing?

Industry comparison strategies

Seek awareness. You cannot compete effectively if you don't know what the yardstick is. For credibility, look for industry and outside benchmarks. This is far better than, "IT is doing well because I say so." Learn about your competition's strategies and results. Are you ahead? Behind?

Always try to improve. If you are standing still, others are going to catch and pass you. Complacency is not a good strategy. Learn what the competitive benchmarks are, for example, for uptime in your industry. Work to perform well relative to those benchmarks.

Allocate attention and resources accordingly, where it is strategically important. Emphasize where you are behind, for example, rather than where you are far ahead already. Use your scant resources wisely.

Why is industry comparison important?

No surprises. Like the old Holiday Inn slogan, "The best surprise is no surprise." By tracking what the industry and your competitors are doing, you avoid surprises like a competitor's new product or their surging use of a customer portal.

Credibility. By using third-party measures, you can present a credible story of how well your IT department is doing.

Communication. Your achievements, in comparison to benchmarks and in comparison to your competitors, provide an excellent message to senior management or the board. Often, they are not aware of such benchmarks or competitive intelligence, so this provides valuable context for your progress reports.

Survival. The comparison may be your ticket to return and play the game again tomorrow.

6 ways to gather competitive intelligence

1. Join Local and National Groups

Associations, like the Society for Information Management (SIM), provide excellent networking opportunities. Such networking can provide insights, ideas, strategies, vendor evaluations and much more. Leverage such opportunities to gather knowledge about the industry and about your competitors.

Local CIO discussion groups. If this does not exist in your area, consider initiating one. These discussions provide insights into such topics as budgets, plans, staffing or outages. Such information can provide excellent competitive intelligence. For example, did a competitor suffer a significant outage, while your IT stats showed best-in-class uptime?

This is also serves as group therapy for CIOs. By sharing common problems and concerns, everyone leaves feeling better.

A vendor's user group. Through user groups, you can glean common practices among customers of that vendor. For example, staffing levels for support or percent of IT budget allocated to this product for licensing, maintenance or staff. Are you spending too much or too little in comparison? What has been the experience with implementing the vendor's latest release?

2. Attend local and national conferences

Inside your industry. This not only provides topics of interest to the industry in general, but on several occasions our competitors gave presentations. Usually secretive, the competitor openly outlined their strategies, projects, successes and challenges. Take good notes!

Outside your industry. While industry events provide insights into your industry and competitors, sometime the best ideas or best practices come from outside your industry. Best in class may be far better than best in your industry. Be open to attending occasional events outside your industry as well. I tried to attend one or two such events per year for perspective.

3. Work with vendor partners

Existing vendors. They may be able to provide advance notice of products or features in their pipeline, possibly under nondisclosure agreements. Explore if you, as a valued customer, might have a window into their innovation. They may also share the contact information of customers who are early adopters, another source of information on forthcoming products and early experiences.

New vendors. These, too, may also provide insight into the industry and who is doing what. While not your vendor, this may be an existing vendor for your competitor. The vendor may have competitive knowledge and may share what is being worked on in the industry and with competitors.

4. Read and research

Competitors may publish articles or be quoted in magazines. Review technology magazines (Computerworld, InformationWeek, CIO magazine) and industry magazines (in healthcare, Healthcare IT News).

Search online sources for industry themes, your competitors or even individuals. For example, a megasearch engine like www.dogpile.com (I did not name it) searches the web using multiple search engines.

Take surveys, like SIM IT Trends Survey or vendor-specific surveys, so you can learn and use the results. Surveys can provide insights into overall direction and trends.

5. Industry analysts

Analysts like Gartner and IDC are good sources for industry benchmarks, like uptime in healthcare or IT budget as a percent of revenue.

For example, we learned from an analyst that we had already achieved best-in-class uptime in the healthcare industry. Couple that with known outages for our competitors, and we had a complete story to share with the board.

Benchmarks on IT budget as a percent of revenue adds perspective when you are making your case to the CFO at budget time.

6.Ask your competitors

If you are struggling to find competitive data, you can also try asking. For example, ask "I'm struggling with maintenance costs. Are you experiencing that?" Your competitors may or may not respond, but you won't know unless you ask. As I quoted Mahatma Gandhi in my earlier article on technology contracts, "If you don’t ask, you don't get."

Now what?

Once you have gathered competitive intelligence, how do you go about using it?

Identify gaps. And allocate resources accordingly.

• Is the gap an area of differentiation? Can marketing use this as a competitive edge in growing the business? It may be worth allocating resources and attention to maintaining the gap.
• If you are ahead, how big is the gap? For example, in patient portal usage, if a competitor is not gaining, is it worth spending money and resources to make the gap bigger? Maybe not.
• If you are behind, it may be worth the effort to close the gap. A narrow gap may not be a differentiator; a large gap may be one.

New products. Is it a race to be first to market? Use your competitive intelligence to assess where others are in the race to a new product. While we were first in our market frequently, what I remember vividly is the time we were second by one day. There is less glory when second, even if by a day.

"Hit 'em where they ain't." William Henry Keeler was one of the best Major League Baseball hitters of all time, and known for this advice, "Keep your eye clear, and hit 'em where they ain't." With knowledge of what your competitors are notdoing, you have an opportunity to invest.

For example, I saw data analytics as an opportunity for a competitive edge. We invested in staffing and technology to make gains in data analytics.

Results

Using the techniques in this article, we were able to achieve:

• National recognition in data analytics, including top honors in data analytics across all industries by a national publication.
• Best in class uptime in healthcare, maintaining that level for four consecutive years.
• Best in class patient portal utilization, per vendor feedback.
• Best in class IT budget, as a percentage of revenue, based on benchmarks from both user group surveys and industry analysts.