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Over the past several months Boston Consulting Group (BCG) published a series of their white papers known as Perspectives on the future of strategy.  The most recent release highlights what they call signal advantage defined as “the ability to capture, interpret and act upon signals from increasingly rich and dynamic data.”  Signal advantage stems from five sequential activities:

1. Acquire relevant data;
2. Recognize relevant patterns in data;
3. Leverage insights to make operational interventions in real-time;
4. Continuously reinvent the business model;
5. Shape the information landscape.

The article’s authors do a nice job highlighting how organizations like Google and Progressive employ these five activities to actually gain signal advantage. 

Signal advantage matters in today’s information and technology rich environment.  Further, it’s clear that organizations can gain bona fide competitive advantage by implementing systems and practices to identify, capture and, most importantly, interpret signals from their environments.  But a question remains:  How can organizations without out access to the latest technology or volumes of data gain signal advantage?  Hopefully answers exist even for organizations that color themselves ’technologically challenged’.

Read the BCG report here:  http://www.bcg.com/documents/file39079.pdf

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