Info Spy

The New England Patriots won three Super Bowl titles in four years, building an NFL superpower that many believed was an era of unmatched competitive poise.

But did a team long considered a model of success and effectiveness cheat to do it? Did the Patriots use means, by which many are describing as

In the NFL, information is relayed to players on the football field from coaches on the sideline in much the same way that a baseball runner receives signs from the third base coach. Like baseball, most football teams use accepted methods, such as the naked eye from across the field, to "break" the signal code and steal the opponent's signs to gain a competitive edge. By understanding what plays are being prepared to be launched, the other team can better anticipate and prepare a counter-strike.

What allegedly happened with the Patriots, which presumably occurs with other NFL teams, is no different than what goes on everyday in the business world. Companies of all sizes use various means, from legal and ethical competitive intelligence analysis to covert espionage and the stealing of proprietary secrets, in order to proactively understand their competitors' next moves. By proactively identifying a competitor's next move, whether it is new sales and marketing tactics, pricing strategies, product roadmap, or M&A plans, companies can blunt the competitor's efforts and potentially reduce the loss of customers and the associated revenue and market share.

In the business world, companies use various means of acquiring this information. I basically categorize competitive analysis into one of three categories:

Legal and ethical. This is the use of 100% legal and ethical means to gather and analyze competitive information. Examples include secondary research (utilizing existing sources of information) and primary research (first person collection of information from one-on-one interviews, surveys, and focus groups).
Legal but unethical. There's definitely a gray line in the world of competitive research. The legal system has not caught up, or has ignored, current competitive research trends that utilize less than honest means. Just because it is legal may not make something ethical. While billions of dollars are spent on IT and network security to prevent hackers from stealing digital information, experts in the art of "social engineering" are going right through a company's front door and gathering confidential and proprietary information from unsuspecting employees. Social engineering involves the manipulation of people, rather than technology, to successfully breach an enterprise's security. Social engineering remains the single greatest security risk, despite our advances in technology, and many of the most damaging security penetrations are the result of social engineering — not electronic "hacking" or "cracking".
Illegal and unethical. Examples in this category include utilizing electronic eavesdropping devices, posing as someone you are not to gain non-public information, and hiring individuals to steal confidential information.

Also in the second category above (legal but unethical) is the issue of "human error". Employees often do dumb things, like leave behind confidential documents at a Kinko's. In various media circles, former Patriots staffers were allegedly paid — or were instructed to pay others — to search meeting rooms of the visiting football teams' hotels for strategic game-time documents. For example, it is fairly typical for a football team to script its first 10 to 15 offensive plays and distribute that list to players the night before a game. Oftentimes, extra copies of these and other documents get left behind in meeting rooms that anyone can pickup. This is equivalent in the business world to a competitor searching through the hotel meeting room of a known board meeting of the target company.

In Pittsburgh, wide receiver Hines Ward told a news reporter this week that he suspected that New England had deciphered the Steelers' offensive plans during the January 2002 AFC championship game.

"They knew a lot of our calls," Ward said. "There's no question some of their players were calling out some of our stuff."

Whether your employer is an NFL football team or a top producing enterprise, you can limit the loss of strategy and confidential information, be it offensive plays or a new product launch strategy, by educating employees on information loss. Making employees aware that they can't leave confidential information lying around — whether it is in a hotel conference room or online in an industry chat forum — is 90% of the battle.

By focusing on what is immediately controllable to reduce information loss, organizations can move to the more complex task of limiting information that is lost through illegal and potentially criminal means.

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