Term Project: Competitive Intelligence

Shanna CainesPrinciples of Searching

Term Project

Carolyn O’Hara MLIS degree Working professional in:

◦ Competitive intelligence◦ Biographical research on executives

User

“Information that is useful for analyzing a company's strategic position in the industry. Information about the competitors and their actions” –eCommerce glossary

“A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing Intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.” –

Wikipedia

Different from espionage in that it is totally legal and ethical

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence as a discipline and profession

How do companies currently do competitive intelligence?

Are there any white papers on competitive intelligence?

Carolyn’s team specializes in competitive intelligence in consulting and accounting

Project Guidelines

Original search was “competitive intelligence” and “consulting” or “accounting” as keywords, but the search was too narrow for any results

I then searched a combination of those three terms tweaking ‘and’ and ‘or’ and changing fields, e.g. keywords, all text, title, etc.

None of the searches were very helpful I broadened search to just competitive

intelligence as a keyword and received 23 results

First Source: Business Source Premier

I sent four citations to Carolyn asking how useful they were

Carolyn found one useful and informed me that most of the citations were too academic

Client interaction

The original plan was to search academic sources because they tend to be more reliable

The next plan was to search web based resources, i.e. Google, About.com, and other web based search engines◦ None were helpful

Changing Search Strategies

Academic sources, but with a different scope ◦ Newspapers◦ Newsletters◦ Blogs◦ Magazines◦ Press releases, etc.

Lexis Nexis and Factiva

narrowed the search to the most recent 90 days

searched “competitive intelligence” which resulted in overwhelming results

edited my search to “competitive intelligence” and accounting or consulting

Used the pane on the left side of the screen to filter the results by type of publication

Lexis Nexis search

Found one useful article that I sent to Carolyn and asked if international articles were helpful

She responded that they were not as helpful as articles based in the U.S. and also information on private companies was more helpful than information on public companies

Client Interaction

searched “competitive intelligence” and accounting or consulting

Similar results to Lexis Nexis including filtering results with the discovery pane

Received two useful results and sent those to Carolyn

Factiva search

Returned to Lexis Nexis for final search and found one useful article

I sent this article to Carolyn and asked for feedback

Feedback was positive

Back to Lexis Nexis…

If I could re-do this project I would take a similar approach in searching

Only difference is that I would probably talk to the user over the phone as opposed to just e-mail

Final Thoughts