|
Is
your company striving to maintain a competitive advantage? Do you need to
uncover information about business rivals? Are you seeking ways to leverage
customer intelligence data? If so, then reliable competitive business
information and strategic foresight can be gleaned from both public and
fee-based Web resources. Several commercial services centralize access
to hundreds of peer-reviewed databases and offer timesaving, standardized
cross-file searching options. Sleuthing public Web sites can also reveal
industry and regulatory shifts, insights about your competition, and
blueprints for intelligence gathering. Both require time investment, first to
ferret out potentially productive resources, and then to execute a variety of
search mechanics to uncover relevant information.
Open-source
routes to business intelligence (BI) and competitive intelligence (CI)
include company Web sites, e-commerce advertisements, electronic full-text
publications (e.g., annual reports; industry reports; journal articles;
market research reports; newspaper articles), government filings,
intellectual property information, and public records. Online
discussion forums focus on ethical and legal aspects of intelligence
gathering programs, share strategies for analyzing and disseminating
information about business competitors, and exchange proven techniques for
measuring the value of mined data. Laws and regulations (e.g., Economic
Espionage Act) are posted on the Web. Details about trade shows and
conferences are publicized that can foster intelligence gathering. Software
aids are evaluated for compiling and analyzing results. The following
Web-based resources facilitate global intelligence research and investigative
due diligence:
CAROL World (tm)
http://www.carol.co.uk/
Once
you become a registered visitor, you have free unlimited portal access to
thousands of annual reports for companies throughout Asia, Europe, and the
United States. The site provides added-value features such as links to media
sources, professional institutes, societies, and stock exchanges throughout
the world. There are many reference resources listed that facilitate
connections to sites such as FreeEdgar Online, which provides open access to
data from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The NewSource current
awareness page posts breaking news about business acquisitions and mergers.
Dialog ®
http://www.dialog.com/
This
commercial online information service offers a range of capabilities and
query options. For example, one can search simultaneously across hundreds of
authoritative databases to locate basic company information, industry
overviews, timely financial profiles, and insights about international
competitive marketing. Added-value features include current awareness
tracking for advertising campaigns, acquisitions and mergers, branding,
e-commerce, employee diversity, executive profiles, exports, facility
closings/relocations, industry rankings, investment opportunities,
investor interests, joint ventures, litigation, marketing strategies, global
news, outsourcing trends, patents, product development trends, press
releases, price trends, product recalls, sales promotions, subsidiaries,
trade shows, and Web presence. Researchers have access to over 180 full-text
publications that focus on various aspects of competitive intelligence.
Dialog also offers specialized search products. For example, Dialog Company
Profiles is geared toward comprehensive business intelligence and fosters
comparisons of companies throughout the world. Dialog@Site offers end-user
search interfaces of selected databases in languages such as Chinese, French,
German, and Spanish.
DM Review Website
http://www.dmreview.com/
Here one has
public access to current and archived articles published in the print version
of DMReview magazine. Focus is on business intelligence and data
warehousing. Moreover, value-added portal features facilitate connections to
subject-relevant Web resources covering topics such as competitor evaluation
techniques, customer relationship management, data mining, decision support
software analysis, e-commerce, enterprise resource planning, knowledge
management, and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) tools. There are links
to registration details for forthcoming Webcast seminars that also focus on
business intelligence, edata warehousing, and enterprise analytics. The
global events calendar gives detailed information about related conferences,
expositions, and seminars.
Factiva (tm)
http://www.factiva.com
This is a
fee-based service of Dow Jones Reuters Business Interactive LLC. It delivers
the full-text of worldwide news and comprehensive business information to the
desktop. Web subscribers can research online a wide range of media offerings
including thousands of newspapers, over 120 up-to-the minute newswires,
scholarly and trade journals, transcripts of radio and television programs,
and images. Public and legal records can also be searched. An added-value
feature is access to the contents of the Fuld Competitive Intelligence
Center. The Center, developed by Fuld & Co. (www.fuld.com) in conjunction
with Factiva and Iron Horse Multimedia, Inc., strives to increase awareness
about best competitive business practices. Also, it provides targeted
multimedia competitive intelligence training and useful reference tools that
facilitate strategic business decisions.
Intelligence Brief
http://www.intelbrief.com/
This
nonprofit Web portal features a growing collection of links to global
resources that focus on intelligence and security issues. There are
about 200 topics covered including business intelligence, competitive
intelligence, economic intelligence, foreign intelligence, and geo-political
intelligence. Featured are links to scholarly reference resources, timely
full-text international newsfeeds, and subject-relevant book reviews.
Decision-makers may also profit by taking advantage of links to sites
provided under security-related headings such as counterintelligence,
intelligence law, intelligence history, computer security, and information
security.
LexisNexis(tm) Company Dossier
www.lexisnexis.com/CompanyDossier/
This
subscription-based service is offered to current LexisNexis customers.
Although an international resource, present emphasis is on U.S.
publicly-traded companies. It draws not only from its own databases but also
from several external authoritative business, legal, and news resources to
compile comprehensive topic-oriented reports. For each company report, the
service strives to provide an overview of the business, information about
competitors, analyses of current news and press releases, financial data,
court decisions, and intellectual property information. Controlled vocabulary
terms facilitate current and retrospective database searching. Hyperlinks are
provided to company information in other major directories (e.g., Standard
& Poor's Register of Corporations).
Search Engine Colossus
http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/
This
cross-cultural portal identifies and provides swift hyperlinks to many unique
Web search engines located in over 200 countries throughout the world.
Although primary focus is usually on native language searching, occasionally
English language user-interface options are provided. This international
directory is indexed by country and topic. It can be useful for gathering
information about businesses and country-specific contacts in foreign lands.
It provides trans-border inroads to the Web, often from unfamiliar
viewpoints.
Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals
http://www.scip.org
This
organization promotes skills building and ethical routes to fostering
corporate intelligence gathering programs. Their Web site offers
information about CI analysis tools, strategies for hiring CI personnel,
techniques for measuring the value of CI programs, details about CI
conferences and trade shows, and systematic use of public and fee-based Web
resources to glean CI information. Members are given Web access to the
full-text of the three Society publications: Competitive Intelligence
Magazine; Competitive Intelligence Review; SCIP's e-newsletter.
The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI).
http://www.dw-institute.com/
This
membership-driven organization focuses on data warehousing and business
intelligence strategies. Primary emphasis is on continuing education and
dissemination of knowledge about new technologies. It sponsors awards,
conferences, discussion forums for information exchange, publications, and
seminars. Its Web site is useful for learning about industry trends, best
practices for competitive advantage, analytics, computer applications, and
case studies. It is a productive resource for publications including journal
articles, books, newsletters, and white papers.
|