Phoenix Consulting Group

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

S.B. Griffith’s popular translation of the military strategy classic, Sun T’zu and The Art of War, can often be found on the reading lists and bookshelves of business leaders and strategists who see their marketplace as battlegrounds as well. In no small part, this owes to the development and application of the principles of strategy during the Second World War and their translation into business operations and planning in the post-war era.

By the latter part of the 1970’s and the early 1980’s strategists in business began realizing more and more that in order to take the fullest advantage of the potential for applying strategy to their operations, they needed the underlying insights provided by some form of an intelligence contribution. By the middle 1980’s, this recognition spawned the first professional organization dedicated to providing a common framework, vocabulary and set of standards for the practice of intelligence in the non-government arena (The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, www.scip.org).

Today, it is an uncommon business leader who does not start his or her day with two basic thoughts:
• What is it about my competitor that is going to allow him to take market share away from me today?
• What is it about my business that will allow me to take market share away from my competitor?

On these two questions hang the nature of intelligence in business: the need to collect, analyze and get into a decision-maker’s hands that information about their competitive environment in order to be able to prevail; the need to protect that which provides a competitive advantage, and which in this information-rich environment means such things as Intellectual Property and the like.

For organizing purposes, it may be helpful to bar in mind the differences between three different approaches to intelligence in the commercial arena:

Business Intelligence: the application of legal, ethical, and largely overt practices to collect, analyze and use information concerning the domestic or international competitive environment.

Industrial Espionage: the application by a commercial organization of certain unethical (e.g., misrepresentation), illegal (e.g., bugging or bribery) or clandestine (e.g., penetrating a competitor company’s employee population with one of your own, or recruiting someone already in place) practices on a domestic or international basis.

Economic Espionage: the engagement of national intelligence services and resources on behalf of a country’s business base as an established, sanctioned, organized and coherent process endorsed by the national leadership (e.g., their targeting of the former KGB, now SVR resources in 1994 against scientific, economic and technological targets to enable the more rapid development of the Russian economy, or the specific activities of Service 7, of the DGSE in France which has the same essential mission).

• American Productivity and Quality Center. Managing Competitive Intelligence Knowledge in a Global Economy. 1998.
• Barndt, Walter D., Jr. The Demand Side of Competitive Intelligence: The Missing Link. Alexandria, VA: Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, 1997.
• Bottom, Norman R. Jr. and Robert R. Yallati. Industrial Espionage – Intelligence Techniques and Countermeasures. Butterworth-Heinemann, 1984.
• Bouthiller, France and Kathleen Shearer. Assessing Competitive Intelligence Software: A Guide to Evaluating CI Technology. Information Today, 2003.
• Burwell, Helen P. Online Competitive Intelligence – Increasing Your Profits Using Cyber-Intelligence. Tempe, AZ: Facts on Demand Press, 1999.
• Choo, Chun Wei. Information Management for the Intelligence Organization: The Art of Scanning the Environment. Information Today, Inc., 2002.
• Coburn, Mathias. Competitive Technical Intelligence: A Guide to Design, Analysis, and Action. New York: American Chemical Society/ Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Fahey, Liam. Competitors: Outwitting, Outmaneuvering, and Outperforming. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
• Fialka, John J. War By Other Means: Economic Espionage in America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
• Fleisher, Craig S. and Babette Bensoussan. Strategic and Competitive analysis: Methods and Techniques for Analyzing Busines Competition. Prentice Hall, 2002.
• Fleisher, Craig S. and David L. Blenkhorn (eds.). Managing Frontiers in Competitive Intelligence. Quorum Books, 2001.
• Friedman, George, Meredith Friedman, Colin Chapman and John S. Baker, Jr. The Intelligence Edge: How to Profit in the Information Age. New York: The Crown Publishing Group, 1997.
• Fuld, Leonard M. Competitor Intelligence How to Get It – How to Use It. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1985.
• Gardner, James R. and William L. Sammon. Competitive Intelligence and Application. USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1984.
• Gilad, Benjamin. Early Warning: Using Competitive Intelligence to Anticipate Market Shifts, Control Risk, and Create Powerful Strategies. New York: 2004.
• Gilad, Benjamin and TamaraGilad. The Business Intelligence System – A New Tool for Competitive Advantage. Amacon, 1988.
• Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 2000.
• Gordon, Ian H. Competitor Targeting: Winning the Battle for Market and Customer Share. John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
• Kahaner, Larry. Competitive Intelligence: From Black Ops to Boardrooms - How Businesses Gather, Analyze, and Use Information to Succeed in the Global Marketplace. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996.
• Kelly, John M. How To Check Out Your Competition: A Complete Plan for Investigating Your Market. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1987.
• Knight, Leila K, Joan Perry, Stanley Baer, Barbara Penfold. How Competitors Learn Your Company’s Secrets. Washington, DC: Washington Researchers Publishing, 1990.
• Lang, Eva M. and Jan Davis Tudor. Best Websites for Financial Professionals, Business Appraisers, and Accountants. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2001.
• Liebowitz, Jay. Building Organizational Intelligence: A Knowledge Management Primer. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2002.
• McGee, Kenneth G. Heads Up: How to Anticipate Business Surprises and Seize Opportunities First. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.
• McGonagle, John J., Jr. and Vella, Carolyn M. Outsmarting The Competition: Practical Approaches to Finding and Using Competitive Information. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc, 1990.
• McGonagle, John J. and Carolyn M. Vella. Bottom Line competitive Intelligence. London and Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2002.
• McGonagle, John J. and Carolyn M. Vella. How to Use a Consultant in Your company: A Managers’ and Executives’ Guide. John Wiley & Sons, 2001.
• McGonagle, John J. and Carolyn M. Vella. Protecting Your Company Against Competitive Intelligence. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1998.
• McNeilly, Mark. Sun Tzu and the Art of Business: Six Strategic Principles for Managers, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Meyer, Herbert E. Real World Intelligence: Organized Information for Executives. Friday Harbor, WA: Storm King Press, 1991.
• Miller, Jerry. Millennium Intelligence: Understanding and Conducting Competitive Intelligence in the Digital Age. Medford, NJ: CyberAge Books, 2000.
• Nolan, John A. Confidential: Uncover Your Competitors’ Top Business Secrets Legally and Quickly- and Protect Your Own. New York: Harper Business, 1999.
• Oster, Sharon M. Modern Competitive Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Penenberg, Adam L., Marc Barry. Spooked: Espionage in Corporate America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing, 2000.
• Pike, Christopher G. Virtual Monopoly; Building and Intellectual Property Strategy for Creative Advantage. Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2001.
• Porter, Michael C. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. New York: The Free Press, 1980.
• Powell, Timothy W. Analyzing Your Competition: It’s Management, Products, Industry Markets. New York: Find SVP, 1993.
• Prescott, John, Stephen H. Miller. Proven Strategies in Competitive Intelligence: Lessons From the Trenches. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2001.
• Robinson, Mark L. Beyond Competitive Intelligence: The Practice of Counterintelligence and Trade Secrets Protection. 1st Books Library, 2003.
• Roukis, George S., Hugh Conway, Bruce H. Charnov. Global Corporate Intelligence: Opportunities, Technologies, and Threats in the 1990s. New York: Quorum Books, 1990.
• Sacks, Risa. Super Searchers Go to the Source: The Interviewing and Hands-on Information Strategies of Top Primary Researchers - Online, On the Phone and In Person. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc,: 2001.
• Salmon, Robert and Yolaine de Linares. Competitive Intelligence: Scanning the Global Environment. Economica/(available in the U.S. through - Washington, DC: Brookings Books), 1999.
• Sawyer, Deborah C. Smart Services – Competitive Information Strategies, Solutions and Success Stories for Service Businesses. Cyberage Books, 2002.
• Schweizer, Peter. Friendly Spies: How America’s Allies are Using Economic Espionage to Steal our Secrets. Canada, The Atlantic Monthly Press: 1993.
• Shaker, Steven M. and Mark Pl Gembicki. The WarRoom Guide to Competitive Intelligence. New York: McGraw Hill, 1998.
• Technical Insights. Competitive Technology Intelligence: Easy Steps to Track Your Business Rivals’ R&D Efforts. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1999.
• Telofski, Richard. Dangerous Competition: Critical Issues in eCompetitive Intelligence Analysis. iUniverse.com, 2001.
• Tyson, Kirk W. M. The Complete Guide to Competitive Intelligence. Kirk Tyson International Ltd., 1998.
• Vine, David. Internet Business Intelligence: How to Build a Big Company System on a Small Company Budget. Medford, NJ: CyberAge Books, 2000.
• Wall, Alf H.III Qualitative Research in Intelligence and Marketing: The New Strategic convergence. Quorum Books, 2000.
• Wall, Alf H. III Rethinking Marketing. Quorum Books, 2000.
• West, Chris. Competitive Intelligence. Global Publishing, 2001.
• Winkler, Ira. Corporate Espionage: What It Is, Why It Is Happening In Your Company, and What You Must Do About It. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, Inc., 1997.
• The Directory of Business Information Resources – 10th Edition. Grey House Publishing, 2002.