Description
The access to an increasing world of information and the deployment of cutting edge information technologies.
BUSINESS COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE –THE ULTIMATE USE
OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IN STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
Prof. Felicia Albescu, Ph.D
Prof. Irina Pugna, Ph.D
Reader Dorel Paraschiv, Ph.D
The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies
Keywords: business intelligence, competitive intelligence, public data-sources,
strategic management
The access to an increasing world of information and the deployment of cutting edge
information technologies empowers the modern corporation to understand itself and
its markets more completely than ever before backing with real data any of the
strategic analysis methods. Benchmarks, market segmentation, opportunities and
threats, strengths and weakness are more accurated and the strategies subsequently
founded are more likely to succeed.
Among public data sources available on Internet one can mention Financial reports of
companies, Trade Registry, National Institute for Statistic, industry organizations
publications, Chamber of Trade and Industry, other governmental or
nongovernmental institutions, Mass-Media at large. The paper presents the design of
a datawarehouse intended to store public information on companies collected from
various sources. The exploiting possibilities vary from market segmentation and
benchmarking to estimated value chains and trophic chains. The paper is an attempt
to apply business intelligence technologies to economic environment analysis making
use of romanian public data sources.
Introduction
Competitive intelligence has undergone a raising interest in recent years as a result of
the information explosion and the sharpness of information technologies. Trying to
define the scope of competitive intelligence, a lot of definitions proposed by business
intelligence professionals and strategic analysts were summed up in the Competitive
Intelligence Handbook [4]. The general opinion of all these business information
professionals is that Competitive Intelligence deals with the collection, selection and
interpretation of publicly-held information that emphasise competitors position,
performance, capabilities and intentions.
Competitive intelligence is the analytical process that transforms scatered
information about competitors and customers into relevant, accurate and usable
strategic knowledge on market evolution, business opportunities and threats
Business intelligence is the activity of monitoring mostly the history of the company
activity for information that is relevant for the decision-making process. Current
information about the environment is needed in the analysis process to make
referrence to as industry benchmarks or just as direct competitors performance levels
to compare against.
1
Competitive intelligence is focused on environment and uses public sources to locate
and develop information on competition and competitors, information later used as
references, benchmarks or any other basis for strategic analysis. Competitive
Intelligence is the natural exploit of the increasing availability of commercial
databases world-wide, the on-line mass-media and the development of cutting edge
information technologies: business intelligence and knowledge management.
The company environment
By its very nature, no business is isolated. In doing its activity, the business will need
to deal with customers, suppliers, employees, and others. In almost all cases there will
also be other organizations offering similar products to similar customers and seeking
similar objectives: growth, profit and fame. These other organizations are known as
competitors.
COMPANY
Local
environment
National
environment
Global
environment
Raw materials market
Energy market
HumanResourcesmarket
Financial market
CLIENTS
CONCURENTS
Fig. 1 The company environment
The company environment could be seen divided into input market and output
market. The input market provides the company with materials, energy, human
resources, finances, capital and any other resource used in business process –
including “”intangibles” resources like economic, natural, social, political, and
technical environment. The output market is in demand of products/services offered
by the company. The environment could be divided also in local, national and global
according to its degree of vicinity against the company.
Competitiveness is a natural relationship between businesses. Business competitors
are other organizations offering the same product or service in the present time but
also in the future and also organizations that could remove the need for a product or
service by offering subtitutes or changing habits.
Monitoring competitors worth a lot because it provides necessary knowledge to be
able to predict their next moves, exploit their weaknesses and undermine their
strengths.
2
According to Arthur Weiss, founder managing partner of AWARE company which
has an international reputation within the Society of Competitive Intelligence
Professionals (SCIP), there are four stages in monitoring competitors - the four "C"s:
Collecting the information
Converting information into intelligence
Communicating the intelligence.
Countering any adverse competitor actions - i.e. making use of gathered
intelligence.
Fig.2 – The 4C- approach of competitive intelligence
A.Weiss Business Information Review 19(2) – 2002 [5]
This approach is war-like , with terminology taken from the military field
(intelligence, counterintelligence and techniques as well. All businesses are fighting
to gain the same resource and occupy the same territory: the market. And like in war,
it is necessary to understand the enemy: his vision, his strengths, where he is
vulnerable; where he can be attacked; where the risk of attack is too great and so on.
The war-like approach of the business relationship with the competitors led to a new
branch of IT applications designated to support competitive intelligence - CI
information systems.
Collecting competitor information
Preliminary decision on what business environmental information must focus on is
made roughly on business strategic plans ranging from planning a new product,
developping a new business line to follow the industry trend or making use of an
entirely new technology up to looking at a potential merger, acquisition or business
partnership. The information requirements for diferrent business decisions will be
completely different and so the information that should be seeked will also be
different. There is no value in information that cannot be used to inform the business's
strategic or tactical decisions and the time, money, and effort spent collecting it is
wasted.
3
At this stage the objective is to identify the key areas of concern for the business
formation will come from a variety of sources, both within the organization and
information. . Secondary sources are
ig.3. Competitive Datawarehouse – Inputs&Outputs
decision makers and the requested information. Thus, rather than collecting
information at random, the search needs to be focused and planned, and aimed at
answering the various intelligence requirements of the business – often termed key
intelligence topics.
In
external to it. Information sources are classified primary and secondary:. Primary
research is often done through a telephone interview, such as contacting suppliers,
customers, analysts, and government agencies.
Secondary sources usually offer general data and
the easiest to access because they are public. . Primary sources offer the most relevant
information, but they are very hard to access Primary sources can represent a means
of completing the data and information which were not obtained from the secondary
sources
FINANCES
MINISTRY
NATIONAL
INSTITUTE
OF
STATISTICS
F
Product/service market analysis
Resources market analysis
TRADE
REGISTRY
MASS
MEDIA
PROFESSIONAL
ORGANIZATIONS
OTHER
GOVERNMENTAL
INSTITUTIONS
OTHER
SOURCES
COMPETITIVE
DATAWAREHOUSE
Main
competitors
evolution
Main
customer s
evolution
Main suppliers
evolution
Financial
market
evolution
4
In the Internet era there are a lot of public electronic primary information sources
most companies are advertising their services, there are numerous other web-sources -
discussion forums, web-logs, customer and governmental sites and so on. One can
also find information at trade shows and conferences, and by interviewing industry
experts, your competitors' customers and suppliers, ex-competitor employees - or
even the competitor although there are ethical issues involved when obtaining
information from some of these sources.
I NTERNAL
ENVIRONMENT
STRENGTH
&
WEAKNESSES
EXTERNAL
ENVIRONMENT
OPPORTUNITI ES
&
THREATS
BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE
COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE
Figure 4. Business and competitive intelligence
Business intelligence is scanning internal environment for summary information
that is relevant for the decision-making. Current information about the environment is
needed in the analysis process to make referrence to as industry benchmarks or just as
direct competitors performance levels to compare against. This reference information
is provided by competitive intelligence which monitors the company environment.
The cross-analysis of information provided by both technologies may be syntetised in
a SWOT matrix, BCG matrix or any other basis for strategic analysis. Michel
Porter’s approach in analysing industry and competitors largely known as Five’s
Forces Model is entirely based on such cross information with great added value. The
strategic business managers seeking to develop an edge over rival firms often use this
model to better understand the industry context in which the firm operates.
Business Information Technologies are seen as cutting edge Information
Technologies made on purpose to support business information engineering . As
exposed in the paper “Business Information Engineering “ - International
Conference on Accounting and Management Information Systems (AMIS) –vol.2 ,
Bucharest-2007 [1] , management methods, techniques and support tools could be
seamless integrated with Business and Competitive Intelligence.
Converting information into intelligence
Unfortunately much of collected data will be redundant, out of date, inaccurate or
incomplete, even wrong.. Like a puzzle, each piece can help build up the compete
picture even if some pieces are missing or damaged, one can often get a good idea of
what the real picture actually is.
5
According to 4CI model, there is a long way from information to intelligence .
Converting information into intelligence is a process consisting of three substages:
-Collate and catalogue information
-Integrate it with other pieces of information
-Analyse and interpret it
All information needs to be collated - with highlighted links to any reference. The
information will need to be indexed and catalogued in order to accommodate new
information coming along. It may be stored in a custom-built or dedicated competitor
database accessible via the company Intranet - although it can also be stored in much
less sophisticated forms.
Finally, the relevance and importance of each piece of information needs to be
interpreted and analysed - on its own and in conjunction with other information,
making use eventually of advanced information technologies like data mining and
knowledge databases.
This is where information starts to become intelligence and can lead to an idea of
competitor strategy and industry future trends.
Communicating the intelligence
Competitor intelligence needs to be evaluated and selectively communicated to all
who need to make decisions based on what customers, suppliers, or other companies
in the market are doing or are likely to do.
Even if this stage seems well understood and well supported by communication
technologies, a new cutting edge technology was developed in order to fully achieve
this goal – Knowledge Management.
Strategic analysis of gathered information
The core of competitive intelligence (CI) is analysis. CI Professionals must be experts
in the use of various analytical models, such as SWOT Analysis, Porter's Five Forces,
PEST, Market Segmentation and special analytical models such as Psychological
Profiling, Shadowing, Reverse Engineering. When applied correctly, these analytical
models can convert disparate pieces of information into actionable intelligence.
CI uses different methods and types of analysis to transform the obtained information
into acting intelligence. A research study made by SCIP (Society of Competitive
Intelligence Professionals) in 2006 shows the most frequently used analysis
methods: Competitor Analysis (known as Competitive Analysis), SWOT analysis and
Industry Analysis based on Porter’s Five Forces Model.
SWOT Analysis (Strategic Analytical Techniques) is used as a base for formulation
the objectives, strategies and their implementation. It must be used after using other
techniques of analyzing the external environment of the company from which the
opportunities and threats are understood, and after using some techniques of internal
environment analysis from which the strengths and weaknesses are detected.
The analysis process is finished by making some intelligence products which take the
shape of some documents and activities as: company profiles (the most used to the
SCIP study above mentioned), competitive benchmarking, market or industry
analysis, early warning alerts, customer or supplier profiles, technology assessments,
6
daily reports, strategic impact analysis, risk and opportunities bulletin, daily CI
bulletin etc. As illustrated in the CI process scheme developed by Arthur Weiss, it is
noticeable that the collection and conversion (analysis) stages are not successive, but
they happen almost simultaneously, because during the conversion stage, some new
collecting needs can occur as consequence of the appearance of some barriers which
block the obtaining of desired results.
Integrating Business Competitive Intelligence in strategic management process
The last phase of CI process refers to the use of intelligence in the decision making
process and is focused on evaluation of decisions' impact over the competitive
position and performances in the own company. The CI process can restart to collect
new information as a consequence of new demand of intelligence. In the CI process,
there is a continuous interaction between producers and end-users of intelligence, both
in the beginning phase to clarify the demands as well as in the feedback phase to
establish the quality and utility for the resulted products.
This last phase will assure the informational and decisional superiority with results in
obtaining competitive advantages.
BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE
APPLICATIONS
COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE
APPLICATIONS
Mission
Objectives
Strategies
Policies
Figure 5 Business&Competitive intelligence Integration
STRATEGY
formulation
choice
implementation
Programs
Budgets
Finance
Procedures
Performances
Results
evaluation
control
7
Competitive Intelligence application
The competitive Intelligence application is based on a central datawarehouse build
mainly on Financial statements of enterprises publised by the Finances ministry. The
financial data are collected for companies along 5 years and completed with CAEN
code of the main activity and Product code associated with CAEN clasification taken
from the PRODROM master file. There are also added data on company location and
other data provided by a specialized company Listafirme that exploit data from Trade
Register and some data from financial statements
PRODROM.txt CAEN.txt
PRODROM.dbf
CAEN.dbf
LISTAFIRME.pdf
Financial
statements
companies.dbf
COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT
DATAWAREHOUSE
Fig 6. . Competitive environment datawarehouse
Fig.7 CAEN database
8
Fig 8. Prodrom database
Fig. 9 Competitive intelligence application data warehouse
Even if classification informations on many companies regarding activitiy object and
delivered products are not always accurate, many cross analysis could give some
insigts on romanian economy. Future developments aims to insert statistical
references provided by National Institute of Statistics and could be expanded to
accomodte data from other countries economies. The utmost use of such competitive
intelligence application could be done if implemented inside a governmental
organisation like Finances Ministry.
Cognitive support
There are many books on the subject - covering everything from finding information
on competitors, to analysing the information and finally using it in business strategy.
for example the classic texts on strategy by Michael Porter - Competitive Strategy and
Competitive Advantage. There are also a lot of CI companies offering research and
analysis services, as well as training and CI workshops so that Business Competitive
Intelligence become a affordable technology even for medium and amall business.
9
Bibliography
1. Albescu, Felicia, Pugna, I. Paraschiv, D. – Business Information Engineering – an approach in
integrating Business & Information Technologies – International Conference on Accounting and
Management Information Systems (AMIS)–vol.2 J une 2007, Bucharest
2. Kahaner, Larry – Competitive Intelligence : How to Gather, Analyse, and Use Information to Move
Your Business to the Top – Touchstone, 1997
3. Porter, Michael – Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors,
FreePress, 1989
4. Richard Comb, & assoc. Competitive Intelligence Handbook – Grolier Scarecrow Press,1992,
5. Weiss, Arthur A brief guide to competitive intelligence – Business information Review ,
(ISSN 0266-3821) vol 19, nb 2 J une 2002
www.scip.org
www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
10
doc_289050250.pdf
The access to an increasing world of information and the deployment of cutting edge information technologies.
BUSINESS COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE –THE ULTIMATE USE
OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IN STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
Prof. Felicia Albescu, Ph.D
Prof. Irina Pugna, Ph.D
Reader Dorel Paraschiv, Ph.D
The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies
Keywords: business intelligence, competitive intelligence, public data-sources,
strategic management
The access to an increasing world of information and the deployment of cutting edge
information technologies empowers the modern corporation to understand itself and
its markets more completely than ever before backing with real data any of the
strategic analysis methods. Benchmarks, market segmentation, opportunities and
threats, strengths and weakness are more accurated and the strategies subsequently
founded are more likely to succeed.
Among public data sources available on Internet one can mention Financial reports of
companies, Trade Registry, National Institute for Statistic, industry organizations
publications, Chamber of Trade and Industry, other governmental or
nongovernmental institutions, Mass-Media at large. The paper presents the design of
a datawarehouse intended to store public information on companies collected from
various sources. The exploiting possibilities vary from market segmentation and
benchmarking to estimated value chains and trophic chains. The paper is an attempt
to apply business intelligence technologies to economic environment analysis making
use of romanian public data sources.
Introduction
Competitive intelligence has undergone a raising interest in recent years as a result of
the information explosion and the sharpness of information technologies. Trying to
define the scope of competitive intelligence, a lot of definitions proposed by business
intelligence professionals and strategic analysts were summed up in the Competitive
Intelligence Handbook [4]. The general opinion of all these business information
professionals is that Competitive Intelligence deals with the collection, selection and
interpretation of publicly-held information that emphasise competitors position,
performance, capabilities and intentions.
Competitive intelligence is the analytical process that transforms scatered
information about competitors and customers into relevant, accurate and usable
strategic knowledge on market evolution, business opportunities and threats
Business intelligence is the activity of monitoring mostly the history of the company
activity for information that is relevant for the decision-making process. Current
information about the environment is needed in the analysis process to make
referrence to as industry benchmarks or just as direct competitors performance levels
to compare against.
1
Competitive intelligence is focused on environment and uses public sources to locate
and develop information on competition and competitors, information later used as
references, benchmarks or any other basis for strategic analysis. Competitive
Intelligence is the natural exploit of the increasing availability of commercial
databases world-wide, the on-line mass-media and the development of cutting edge
information technologies: business intelligence and knowledge management.
The company environment
By its very nature, no business is isolated. In doing its activity, the business will need
to deal with customers, suppliers, employees, and others. In almost all cases there will
also be other organizations offering similar products to similar customers and seeking
similar objectives: growth, profit and fame. These other organizations are known as
competitors.
COMPANY
Local
environment
National
environment
Global
environment
Raw materials market
Energy market
HumanResourcesmarket
Financial market
CLIENTS
CONCURENTS
Fig. 1 The company environment
The company environment could be seen divided into input market and output
market. The input market provides the company with materials, energy, human
resources, finances, capital and any other resource used in business process –
including “”intangibles” resources like economic, natural, social, political, and
technical environment. The output market is in demand of products/services offered
by the company. The environment could be divided also in local, national and global
according to its degree of vicinity against the company.
Competitiveness is a natural relationship between businesses. Business competitors
are other organizations offering the same product or service in the present time but
also in the future and also organizations that could remove the need for a product or
service by offering subtitutes or changing habits.
Monitoring competitors worth a lot because it provides necessary knowledge to be
able to predict their next moves, exploit their weaknesses and undermine their
strengths.
2
According to Arthur Weiss, founder managing partner of AWARE company which
has an international reputation within the Society of Competitive Intelligence
Professionals (SCIP), there are four stages in monitoring competitors - the four "C"s:
Collecting the information
Converting information into intelligence
Communicating the intelligence.
Countering any adverse competitor actions - i.e. making use of gathered
intelligence.
Fig.2 – The 4C- approach of competitive intelligence
A.Weiss Business Information Review 19(2) – 2002 [5]
This approach is war-like , with terminology taken from the military field
(intelligence, counterintelligence and techniques as well. All businesses are fighting
to gain the same resource and occupy the same territory: the market. And like in war,
it is necessary to understand the enemy: his vision, his strengths, where he is
vulnerable; where he can be attacked; where the risk of attack is too great and so on.
The war-like approach of the business relationship with the competitors led to a new
branch of IT applications designated to support competitive intelligence - CI
information systems.
Collecting competitor information
Preliminary decision on what business environmental information must focus on is
made roughly on business strategic plans ranging from planning a new product,
developping a new business line to follow the industry trend or making use of an
entirely new technology up to looking at a potential merger, acquisition or business
partnership. The information requirements for diferrent business decisions will be
completely different and so the information that should be seeked will also be
different. There is no value in information that cannot be used to inform the business's
strategic or tactical decisions and the time, money, and effort spent collecting it is
wasted.
3
At this stage the objective is to identify the key areas of concern for the business
formation will come from a variety of sources, both within the organization and
information. . Secondary sources are
ig.3. Competitive Datawarehouse – Inputs&Outputs
decision makers and the requested information. Thus, rather than collecting
information at random, the search needs to be focused and planned, and aimed at
answering the various intelligence requirements of the business – often termed key
intelligence topics.
In
external to it. Information sources are classified primary and secondary:. Primary
research is often done through a telephone interview, such as contacting suppliers,
customers, analysts, and government agencies.
Secondary sources usually offer general data and
the easiest to access because they are public. . Primary sources offer the most relevant
information, but they are very hard to access Primary sources can represent a means
of completing the data and information which were not obtained from the secondary
sources
FINANCES
MINISTRY
NATIONAL
INSTITUTE
OF
STATISTICS
F
Product/service market analysis
Resources market analysis
TRADE
REGISTRY
MASS
MEDIA
PROFESSIONAL
ORGANIZATIONS
OTHER
GOVERNMENTAL
INSTITUTIONS
OTHER
SOURCES
COMPETITIVE
DATAWAREHOUSE
Main
competitors
evolution
Main
customer s
evolution
Main suppliers
evolution
Financial
market
evolution
4
In the Internet era there are a lot of public electronic primary information sources
most companies are advertising their services, there are numerous other web-sources -
discussion forums, web-logs, customer and governmental sites and so on. One can
also find information at trade shows and conferences, and by interviewing industry
experts, your competitors' customers and suppliers, ex-competitor employees - or
even the competitor although there are ethical issues involved when obtaining
information from some of these sources.
I NTERNAL
ENVIRONMENT
STRENGTH
&
WEAKNESSES
EXTERNAL
ENVIRONMENT
OPPORTUNITI ES
&
THREATS
BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE
COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE
Figure 4. Business and competitive intelligence
Business intelligence is scanning internal environment for summary information
that is relevant for the decision-making. Current information about the environment is
needed in the analysis process to make referrence to as industry benchmarks or just as
direct competitors performance levels to compare against. This reference information
is provided by competitive intelligence which monitors the company environment.
The cross-analysis of information provided by both technologies may be syntetised in
a SWOT matrix, BCG matrix or any other basis for strategic analysis. Michel
Porter’s approach in analysing industry and competitors largely known as Five’s
Forces Model is entirely based on such cross information with great added value. The
strategic business managers seeking to develop an edge over rival firms often use this
model to better understand the industry context in which the firm operates.
Business Information Technologies are seen as cutting edge Information
Technologies made on purpose to support business information engineering . As
exposed in the paper “Business Information Engineering “ - International
Conference on Accounting and Management Information Systems (AMIS) –vol.2 ,
Bucharest-2007 [1] , management methods, techniques and support tools could be
seamless integrated with Business and Competitive Intelligence.
Converting information into intelligence
Unfortunately much of collected data will be redundant, out of date, inaccurate or
incomplete, even wrong.. Like a puzzle, each piece can help build up the compete
picture even if some pieces are missing or damaged, one can often get a good idea of
what the real picture actually is.
5
According to 4CI model, there is a long way from information to intelligence .
Converting information into intelligence is a process consisting of three substages:
-Collate and catalogue information
-Integrate it with other pieces of information
-Analyse and interpret it
All information needs to be collated - with highlighted links to any reference. The
information will need to be indexed and catalogued in order to accommodate new
information coming along. It may be stored in a custom-built or dedicated competitor
database accessible via the company Intranet - although it can also be stored in much
less sophisticated forms.
Finally, the relevance and importance of each piece of information needs to be
interpreted and analysed - on its own and in conjunction with other information,
making use eventually of advanced information technologies like data mining and
knowledge databases.
This is where information starts to become intelligence and can lead to an idea of
competitor strategy and industry future trends.
Communicating the intelligence
Competitor intelligence needs to be evaluated and selectively communicated to all
who need to make decisions based on what customers, suppliers, or other companies
in the market are doing or are likely to do.
Even if this stage seems well understood and well supported by communication
technologies, a new cutting edge technology was developed in order to fully achieve
this goal – Knowledge Management.
Strategic analysis of gathered information
The core of competitive intelligence (CI) is analysis. CI Professionals must be experts
in the use of various analytical models, such as SWOT Analysis, Porter's Five Forces,
PEST, Market Segmentation and special analytical models such as Psychological
Profiling, Shadowing, Reverse Engineering. When applied correctly, these analytical
models can convert disparate pieces of information into actionable intelligence.
CI uses different methods and types of analysis to transform the obtained information
into acting intelligence. A research study made by SCIP (Society of Competitive
Intelligence Professionals) in 2006 shows the most frequently used analysis
methods: Competitor Analysis (known as Competitive Analysis), SWOT analysis and
Industry Analysis based on Porter’s Five Forces Model.
SWOT Analysis (Strategic Analytical Techniques) is used as a base for formulation
the objectives, strategies and their implementation. It must be used after using other
techniques of analyzing the external environment of the company from which the
opportunities and threats are understood, and after using some techniques of internal
environment analysis from which the strengths and weaknesses are detected.
The analysis process is finished by making some intelligence products which take the
shape of some documents and activities as: company profiles (the most used to the
SCIP study above mentioned), competitive benchmarking, market or industry
analysis, early warning alerts, customer or supplier profiles, technology assessments,
6
daily reports, strategic impact analysis, risk and opportunities bulletin, daily CI
bulletin etc. As illustrated in the CI process scheme developed by Arthur Weiss, it is
noticeable that the collection and conversion (analysis) stages are not successive, but
they happen almost simultaneously, because during the conversion stage, some new
collecting needs can occur as consequence of the appearance of some barriers which
block the obtaining of desired results.
Integrating Business Competitive Intelligence in strategic management process
The last phase of CI process refers to the use of intelligence in the decision making
process and is focused on evaluation of decisions' impact over the competitive
position and performances in the own company. The CI process can restart to collect
new information as a consequence of new demand of intelligence. In the CI process,
there is a continuous interaction between producers and end-users of intelligence, both
in the beginning phase to clarify the demands as well as in the feedback phase to
establish the quality and utility for the resulted products.
This last phase will assure the informational and decisional superiority with results in
obtaining competitive advantages.
BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE
APPLICATIONS
COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE
APPLICATIONS
Mission
Objectives
Strategies
Policies
Figure 5 Business&Competitive intelligence Integration
STRATEGY
formulation
choice
implementation
Programs
Budgets
Finance
Procedures
Performances
Results
evaluation
control
7
Competitive Intelligence application
The competitive Intelligence application is based on a central datawarehouse build
mainly on Financial statements of enterprises publised by the Finances ministry. The
financial data are collected for companies along 5 years and completed with CAEN
code of the main activity and Product code associated with CAEN clasification taken
from the PRODROM master file. There are also added data on company location and
other data provided by a specialized company Listafirme that exploit data from Trade
Register and some data from financial statements
PRODROM.txt CAEN.txt
PRODROM.dbf
CAEN.dbf
LISTAFIRME.pdf
Financial
statements
companies.dbf
COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT
DATAWAREHOUSE
Fig 6. . Competitive environment datawarehouse
Fig.7 CAEN database
8
Fig 8. Prodrom database
Fig. 9 Competitive intelligence application data warehouse
Even if classification informations on many companies regarding activitiy object and
delivered products are not always accurate, many cross analysis could give some
insigts on romanian economy. Future developments aims to insert statistical
references provided by National Institute of Statistics and could be expanded to
accomodte data from other countries economies. The utmost use of such competitive
intelligence application could be done if implemented inside a governmental
organisation like Finances Ministry.
Cognitive support
There are many books on the subject - covering everything from finding information
on competitors, to analysing the information and finally using it in business strategy.
for example the classic texts on strategy by Michael Porter - Competitive Strategy and
Competitive Advantage. There are also a lot of CI companies offering research and
analysis services, as well as training and CI workshops so that Business Competitive
Intelligence become a affordable technology even for medium and amall business.
9
Bibliography
1. Albescu, Felicia, Pugna, I. Paraschiv, D. – Business Information Engineering – an approach in
integrating Business & Information Technologies – International Conference on Accounting and
Management Information Systems (AMIS)–vol.2 J une 2007, Bucharest
2. Kahaner, Larry – Competitive Intelligence : How to Gather, Analyse, and Use Information to Move
Your Business to the Top – Touchstone, 1997
3. Porter, Michael – Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors,
FreePress, 1989
4. Richard Comb, & assoc. Competitive Intelligence Handbook – Grolier Scarecrow Press,1992,
5. Weiss, Arthur A brief guide to competitive intelligence – Business information Review ,
(ISSN 0266-3821) vol 19, nb 2 J une 2002
www.scip.org
www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk
10
doc_289050250.pdf