CI analysts spend 80% of their time on data work and 20% on the strategic thinking that actually influences decisions. The ratio is wrong.
The strategic work is what CI is supposed to be. Anticipating competitive moves, synthesizing across programs, surfacing insights that change how leadership thinks about a market. That's the part that matters. And it gets whatever time the noise leaves behind.
The noise
Google Alerts, ClinicalTrials.gov updates, SEC filing notifications, RSS feeds, PubMed digests, industry newsletters, stakeholder asks. Hundreds of items a week across a dozen sources. Most of it is noise. Re-syndicated press releases, routine filings, publications that mention a competitor in passing.
Buried in that noise, occasionally, is something that actually matters. A data point that changes the competitive picture.
The problem is you can't tell which is which without processing all of it.
Signal has a half-life
Intelligence that surfaces Monday morning changes a strategy conversation. The same intelligence buried in Thursday's alert batch is already stale.
Every source delivers at its own pace. Google Alerts batch overnight. ClinicalTrials.gov updates whenever records change. Newsletters arrive weekly. SEC filings post on EDGAR's schedule. None of them know what you're watching for or how urgent any given update is. They just dump everything into the same stream.
When CI works, it's genuinely valuable. You catch something early, connect it to what you already know, surface it before a decision gets made. But that only happens if the signal arrives in time. Right now nothing in the workflow respects that.
Why better filters won't fix it
"Build better filters" is the obvious fix. But relevance in CI is contextual. The same event is critical or meaningless depending on what else is happening.
An 8-K filing could be a material event or a routine auditor change. A new publication could be novel data or a rehash. You can't filter by keyword or filing type. You need to know what's happening with that specific competitor, that specific program, at that specific moment to decide whether it matters.
That requires combining every alert with everything you already know about the competitive landscape. Humans do that kind of synthesis well. They can't sustain it at volume, week after week.
So you start skimming. And the thing you skim past might be the signal.
The patchwork
There's no single system that holds the full competitive picture. Vendor platforms for pipeline data. Spreadsheets for what the vendor doesn't cover. Slide decks for the landscapes leadership reads. A dozen browser tabs for the sources you check manually.
Every CI analyst I know has some version of this patchwork. The tools vary. The fragmentation doesn't. Nothing connects.
The tools are good at storing facts. They're bad at surfacing what those facts mean in context.
The ratio
80% data work. 20% strategic thinking. The thinking is the part that influences decisions, and it gets squeezed into whatever's left after triage, tracker updates, landscape rebuilds, and source switching.
I want to flip that ratio. That's what I'm building toward.
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