Do you know what your competitors are up today? Do you know what your clients are up to today?

With so much being done online these days, you can draw a great deal of business intelligence from the web. Google is obviously a great tool. However, if you rely solely on doing ad hoc searches in Google, your information is only as good that particular moment in time that you search. This is why you need Google Alerts - a free service from Google that can send you an email whenever it indexes new content based on a search string that you specify.

In my case, I get alerts on my top ten or so competitors – both the company name and the names of the principals of that competitor. If you don’t know the names of the owners and executives of your competition, simply check on Linkedin.com or Jigsaw (and shame on you for not knowing anyway).

I also get similar alerts on all of my clients and the relevant executives at those organizations. Why? Lots of reasons. If they get good press or an award, I’d like to congratulate them, maybe send a gift. If they get bad press  – like they are starting to go under, or they lost a big deal recently – I can prepare for that too.

Certainly you should setup alerts for you and your company so you know when Google indexes new content about either. It’s good to know what’s out there pointing back to you. Sometimes, it may not be good and this will certainly give you an edge at getting bad content removed from the web as quickly as possible before someone else Googles you or your company name.

There are obviously other ways Google Alerts can be used. You might want to get alerts on search terms that you share with competitors. For example, my company, Carceron, provides managed IT services to the Atlanta market. So I might setup an alert for “atlanta managed IT services” to see who else Google is indexing on page one for that search term. This will also help give you an idea of position changes for that time (who’s moving up and down the page).

Just remember that each alerts generates an email, and if you have over 100 alerts like I do, it can be a bit tedious going through them all. You can change the frequency of alerts from “as it happens” to “Daily to “Weekly”. You can set all alerts to the same frequency or use different frequency levels. I recommend keeping alerts on yourself and your company on “as it happens”.

If you really want to get into this and have the money to burn, you can get a competitive intelligence system like Atlanta-based CI Radar.

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The concept of Time Compression was recently introduced to me by a client at the conclusion of a recent meeting. I was so enthralled by what he taught me that I did some more research that night and found several articles that further elaborated on the concept and what it means for business.

The first article I found, Technology’s Time Compression, is an excellent primer. At the bottom of that article are links to several other articles, all worth reading, but the two that were most interesting to me were It’s Time for Zero Time and We are Literally Trying to Stop Time.

What I got out of the latter two articles is that, at a minimum, we are trying to reach zero time, preferably negative time. The analogy of a track runner is quite appropriate. Track runners are constantly trying to reduce their times, with the ideal time being zero seconds. But can we achieve negative time? I don’t think a runner could, but we might able to as business owners. This is why business intelligence (BI) and dashboards are so hot right now. Dashboards are more than being able to see real time performance – they are about predicting the future and being ready to adapt to it instantly. You might argue that adapting instantly would be a definition of zero time. However, without proper business intelligence, you won’t be able to make the necessary predictions and subsequent preparations for that instantaneous switch. Negative Time is about being able predict when the change will come and changing at that precise moment (because you’re ready for it), versus reacting to the change once it has come to pass – where the first phase of the reaction is planning (what are we going to do?) and execution (doing it) both of which take time and make you late to the race.

Think about how this translates to business in terms of things like response time, resolution time, order time, processing time, or any other operational task where time is “consumed”.

In my business, Carceron, we monitor servers, networks and desktops in attempt to predict failure. These articles tell me that we can probably be doing a lot more with our monitoring and other business processes.

How can you achieve Negative Time in some of your business processes?