How PMU's market watch team put 57 countries of competitive intelligence in one place

The mandate existed. The infrastructure did not.

PMU is the third largest horse betting operator in the world, present in 57 countries. In an industry shaped by international competition, regulation and fast-moving player behaviour, staying ahead is not a matter of instinct. It is a matter of systematic intelligence, which is the job of the Product and Market Watch department.

• The brief was clear and the tooling was not. Monitor international markets, track competitors, turn what you find into decisions leadership can act on. Nothing supported the middle part.
• Everything was scattered. Market information, player data and institutional documents sat in different places and were hard to consolidate into a single view.
• Reacting late is the same as not reacting. The team needed to move at the speed of the market, and consolidation by hand does not.
• A bespoke build was off the table. Internal IT resources could not carry a complex development project, so whatever the team chose had to be something they could run themselves.

A structured base that behaves like a conversation

Intelligence work needs two things at once, and they usually pull against each other: enough structure that a growing archive stays navigable, and enough openness that people actually contribute to it.

• Contribution had to be effortless. A modern, straightforward interface was a baseline requirement, because every extra step between having a finding and publishing it is a finding that never gets published.
• The team structures its own knowledge. Spaces, tabs and archives get created without an IT dependency, so the architecture keeps moving as the intelligence brief changes.
• Four spaces mirror how the work is actually done. The international department space holds working documents, the operational backbone of the team's day. The competitive intelligence space carries the analysis: presentations, rules, competition news and benchmark studies, organised for comparison. The international news space is the live feed of market developments. External publications spaces organise political and regulatory content by continent, giving the analysis its context.
• Flows converge instead of accumulating. Multiple external sources land in one place, which is what makes the base usable to a team whose currency is current, accurate information.

I particularly appreciate how Elium combines the dynamics and the collective intelligence of social networks with a structured document database. This reinforces the impact and scope of our work.

Less time assembling, more time analysing

The time needed to produce the department's own output fell: newsletters, intelligence syntheses and strategic reports all got faster to build, because the material behind them became easy to find and easy to reuse.

Collaborators became more autonomous. They pull knowledge when they need it rather than waiting for a formal distribution round, which removes the team as a bottleneck on its own intelligence. With everything reachable from the cloud, working remotely stopped being a logistical constraint.

Underneath the efficiency sits the point of the exercise, which is harder to put a number on. A team that is better informed about its market makes better calls. For a department whose stated job is to fuel strategic choices, that is not a side benefit.

Competitive intelligence is high volume, fast-moving and external, which is why a document store never holds it. PMU needed structure and open contribution in the same tool, and stopped assembling its material by hand.