1.
Introduction
Business
and Marketing discipline is experiencing drastic, dynamic and dramatic changes
in global market scenarios and the technological advances are enabling the
organizations to serve much longer geographical markets. Each new opportunity
demands the feeling of a clear picture of past, present and an understanding of
the most important option for future. During the last decades, there have been
several studies on how to use knowledge of market to gain competitive advantage
[1]. It is going to be more important in the future because competing
organizations increasingly have access to the same market intelligence. Thus
competitive advantage lies in the firm’s ability to use market intelligence and
not in its access to market intelligence. Market intelligence disseminated
across functions represents an integral component of market orientation, which
is a major concern of the business today [2]. Marketers used to target
customer, now they must learn how to invite them. Organizations when fail to
use the market knowledge which can be readily available to them, are planning
to be non competitive and eventually to be called a sick organization.
Information
Technology is revolutionizing the whole world, the governments, the businesses
and the society in which we live. For a business manager to work in a knowledge
intensive (South Asian) economy or knowledge based (G-7) economy, IT has
enabled him to have more complete information to make faster decisions, and
have provided him more opportunities to collaborate and share information. In fact, this IT enabled shared culture has
also influenced the management styles and organizational structures to be more
flexible, dynamic, innovative, caring and learning. People (the stakeholders) in markets are
fully accessible, any time, regardless of where they are.
Internet
and web have significantly changed the rules of competition. Organizations need to re-evaluate their
business model and create new strategic models.
One of the critical shifts of the new knowledge based economy is
e-business which accounts for approximately US $ 7 trillions by 2005. Since
market penetration is only possible by going after your customers, then by
going after your competitor's customers and then followed by going to those in
no-man's land (Creating a new market niche).
All of it is now easily manageable by employing proper IT infrastructure
and tools. Improvements in innovation
and creativity is required to quickly respond to market needs and better
understanding of value chain is possible by alignment of IT strategy with right
market competitive strategy.
Development
and deployment of knowledge based system and infrastructure for knowledge
management has been possible because of collaborative warehouses of information
and integration of decisions throughout entire organization. Programs of CRM, SCM and value chain
management have been enabled due to efficient and effective role of IT and in
return managers, workers, customers and competitors are all more capable of
making intelligent decisions.
Over
the past five to seven years, the data warehouse has become a standard
component of the architecture and strategic direction of most businesses. There
is a driving need for businesses to assess and improve competitive position in
the marketplace. This business driver manifests itself in the race to collect
information, analyze results, predict future trends and make well-informed
tactical and strategic business decisions. Trends and needs for the deployment
of data warehousing structures and business intelligence tools to attain market
intelligence are increasing gradually.
By
2004 the average company will have collected 120 terabytes of customer data [3].
The data warehouse environment eventually hits the information overload
wall. IT has to play its role to provide the processing and knowledge-gathering
tools to get over it. The challenge is not just to collect and store it
efficiently, but be able to analyze and use it effectively.
2. Evolution
of Market Intelligence
Information
Technology is playing its part and the value of data warehouses and market
intelligence is increasing significantly. The need for reporting has moved from
static reporting to proactive/interactive information discovery and from highly
structured data to more unstructured information. The primary purpose of the
data warehouse is shifting from a focus on data transformation into information
and to most recently transformation into intelligence. In order to better
understand this trend, it is useful to look at the curve of Market Intelligence
Value Chain in figure 1.
3. Mobile
Agents and Knowledge Engineering from Data Warehouses
Data
warehouse has evolved into a necessary foundation for the successful trend of
decision-support system development environments. With a well-developed data
warehouse in place, every aspect of imaginable business circumstances can be
seen. OLAP tools provide advanced functionality, allowing multidimensional data
analysis. They also offer the ability to page, rotate, and aggregate warehouse
data to provide a “real life” view of the business situation for advanced
analytical purposes. Mobile agent solutions in a data warehouse environment
maximize warehouse investment and enable business intelligence. The key to
implementing these solutions is to start small, deliver something fast, and
build incrementally. Mobile agents play a big role in this scenario in
comparison with the existing OLAP tools and technologies.
The key to delivering “value-added”
applications is to create more intelligent software that can help delegate some
of the responsibilities from any stake holder. Agents have the ability to
represent and store agent knowledge, which consists of facts about an agent’s
surroundings or relevant information about an agent’s responsibilities or
tasks. The majority of an agent’s knowledge base is programmed, but an agent
can then add to its knowledge base by tracking events in its surroundings.
Agents also gain knowledge from monitoring user actions and behavior. The
agents must be working offline, independent of the user and the OLAP reporting
tool.
The
following figure gives an overview of how Market Intelligence is inculcated in
the decision of management by making use of Business Intelligence.
Mobile
agents have a number of more advanced features, but the focus is on the three
most desirable ones.
Mobility lets the agent move from computer to
computer across a network in order to perform its task. The agent’s domain can
be as large as the Internet or as small as an individual business group within
an organization. [6]
Advanced information gathering techniques, such as data mining, can be
incorporated into agent intelligence [6]. Data mining is becoming more
attractive to companies that invest in data warehouses. These warehouses hold a
great deal of untapped information that can be very valuable to a company. Data
mining can help uncover hidden patterns within that data. Data mining agents
can work offline to find interesting patterns in data and then report their
findings back to an analyst using an OLAP system.
Knowledge transfer among
agents adds power to agent
intellect exponentially [7]. This capability lets agents collaborate on tasks
or problems. It also lets agents enable other agents to perform tasks on their
behalf.
4 –
Business Plan based on Market Intelligence
Observations
about both data warehousing and the capabilities of Mobile Agents have been
made.
The
characteristics of both the data warehouse and the business intelligence tools
have changed the enterprise view and the business value chain, from reactive to
interactive to proactive, from structured data to unstructured business
information and from broad audience to customized and targeted customer market
views. The ultimate convergence of these paths is the formation of the
intelligent market though market intelligence. Following benefits are eminent
and straight forward for business planning, may it be short term or long term.
1 - Provide customized,
personalized information to each individual consumer. This can be accomplished with information
boards that dig out information from warehouses through mobile agents and
present it to each end-user's needs and interaction style uniquely.
2 - Leveraging individualized
views to provide a meaningful information exchange. This collaboration occurs in an easy-to-use
context that is intuitively perceived and instantly acted upon by the user.
3 - Use of active agents and
triggers to provide automated responses to business information stimuli. Improve responsiveness to business events
and market demands through intelligent analysis and correlation of information
thus making proper use of Market Intelligence.
4 - Use of stored and
integrated information assets, including data warehouses and marts, to full
advantage. This
information, combined with external information sources, provides the big
picture to business constituencies. Again, the power of the Information
Technology Tools is the best enabler for efficient distribution of and access
to integrated information.
5 - Exploiting the information
power. Gain power and market dominance by using complete and timely information
to drive all business decisions and processes. Information is the glue that binds Market
Intelligence with Information Technology tools, allowing organizations to
complete their transformation so that there are no gaps in knowledge management
policies and practices.
5 -
Intelligent Market Preparedness in Pakistan
Business
opportunities of seismic proportion are forming due to the world of information
technology. Enterprises that realize the value of harnessing the power of the
emerging market intelligence and the convergence of business intelligence/data
warehousing and new technologies will be able to reach the summit of market
domination and unmatched competitive advantage long before their competitors.
Pakistani
businessmen with land lord or political background are very good in maintaining
accounts but they generally overlook the use of knowledge, intelligence or
marketing intelligence. MI can increase their sales, profits, number of loyal
customers and the satisfaction of their customers. The problem with Pakistani
executives is that they consider some very specific data, concentrate on one or
two alternatives and make the decision. On the other hand for example, Japanese
rely on extensive real-time information about internal and external environment
and hold intensive meetings with junior colleagues, hence quality of decision
is increased many fold. The new differentiator for the 21st century is an
intelligence driven business strategy. Any Pakistani company which will ride on
this tide sooner will capitalize this opportunity and can emerge as tomorrow’s
market leader in global digital economy. Information Technology is a
facilitator to turn information into intelligence and has the full potential to
turn intelligence into profit.
References
1- (a) C. Mooman, G. Zaltman and R. Desphande (1992)
J. Marketing Research, 29 (314-328) and (b) J. Marketing (1993) 57 (81-101)
2- S. Slater and J.C. Narver
(1994) J. Marketing 58 (46-55)
- Bernard Liautaud and Mark Hammond, “e-Business
Intelligence”(2001) McGraw Hill
- Amrit Tiwana, “The
knowledge Management Toolkit”(2000) Prentice Hall
- The Gartner Group – Lex Column article, Financial Times,
- H. Farooq
Ahmad and Kinji Mori, “Faded Information Field Construction for Autonomous
Information Service System”, IWDCCA Proceedings, 2000
- Vu Anh Pham
and Ahmad Karmouch, “