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In October 2017, the Council launched a new survey on global issues tracking. Here is how the results stack up:
More than half of respondents (52%) don’t have a formal internal global issues tracking process. However, 72% of respondents have designated team members who are specifically tasked with issues tracking.
Most firms (81%) don’t outsource issues tracking to another firm, and rely on specific tracking tools, such as monitoring services or software programs) to aid in their work (67%).
What are the main challenges?
- Establishing priorities: In an age of too much information and too little time, knowing what to pay attention to, filtering and ensuring all business-relevant issues are captured and tracked is a challenge for many respondents.
- Cultural differences: Global issues tracking presents a unique challenge due to research language barriers, as well as a lack of informational transparency, access and data availability in certain markets, especially at the local level.
- Lack of internal resources: Whether financial, time or staff-related, the lack of necessary resources to track and assess volumes of information makes global issues tracking especially challenging. Many also wish for a more consistent and centralized internal contact process that allows the business to better understand the issues management process
- Lack of external tools: On everyone’s wish list? One comprehensive tool or platform that would allow for the timely and “real time” identification and tracking of emerging issues. Many respondents also wish for a quality service provider who can add political intelligence to the findings they provide.
What kind of resources are needed?
- Quality: Better tracking tools are needed, especially ones that link regulatory and legislative issues. More reasonable prices were also mentioned as a factor by several survey respondents.
- Going beyond open source: Resources that add qualitative insights on issue development, political intelligence and insights on what goes on behind the scenes at the political level in various countries would make global issues tracking more manageable.
- Customization: Tools that set alerts and perform searches by industry, country or region would make it easy to customize and tailor information for its users, as well as share across various teams.
- Visuals: Digital platforms that analyze findings and turn them into graphs from government and civil society resources would create another way to present information on issues and challenges to everyone from analyst to senior executive.
According to the survey, here are the firms hired and tools used by Council members for issues tracking:
- StateNet
- Bloomberg
- International Strategic Analysis (ISA)
- SIGWATCH
- BGov
- PoliticoPro
- Stateside
- EU Issuetracker
- Meltwater
- USDA gain reports
- WTO updates
- Sonar
- Trendkite
- Dods
- Cision
- FiscalNote
- LexisNexis
- SharePoint
- Spark
- Interel (Europe)
- DeHavilland
- Ebiquity
- MultiState
- CQ
Other resources for issues tracking include:
- A network of regional partners (South and Central America, EU, India)
- Consultants
- Universities
- Contacts based on region
- General news alerts (Google) and media monitoring services
- Open source media
- Internal sources (internal databases, excel spreadsheets)
- Trade association updates
- Subscription newsletters by industry
To help you get ahead, the Council will be hosting a Global Issues Tracking webinar on January 16, with insights and advice from Cargill and APCO Worldwide. You can register here. Questions? Contact Dasha Iventicheva, Senior International Associate.