Business Intelligence

Imagine your main business competitor building a satellite-equipped "war room" to secretly monitor your new ventures. Imagine your classified product prototype mysteriously landing on the market under the brand name belonging to your archrival. Impossible? This isn't a story line from the latest spy thriller, it's modern-day corporate America. Spooked thrusts readers into a clandestine world -- where business means war and information is worth stealing.

Through narrative accounts of corporate spies within companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Motorola, Spooked dramatically brings to life one of America's fastest-growing industries: Corporate Intelligence. In this page-burning expose, Adam Penenberg and Marc Barry uncover and describe in thrilling detail the alarming regularity of espionage in industry. They offer an unsettling portrait of America's publicly traded companies, and unravel the truth and hypocrisy behind the multi-billion dollar corporate intelligence industry.

For specialists and nonspecialists alike, this perceptive selection of the newest and the up and coming tools and techniques of competitive intelligence picks up where other books leave off, offering a well balanced combination of theory and practice. It shows how advances in computers and technology have accelerated progress in CI management, and the ways in which CI has affected (and been affected by) major business functions and processes. It explores applications to organizations of various sizes and types. Analysts, strategists and organizational decision makers will find the book especially valuable, as they seek to make sense of the business environment and assess their organizations' evolving, dynamic places in it.

One step above knowledge management systems are business intelligence systems. Their purpose is to give decision makers a better understanding of their organization's operations, and thus another way to outmaneuver the competition, by helping to find and extract the meaningful relationships, trends, and correlations that underlie the organization's operations and ultimately contribute to its success. Thierauf also shows that by tying critical success factors and key performance indicators into business intelligence systems, an organization's most important financial ratios can also be improved. Thierauf's book will advance the knowledge and skills of all information systems providers and users

Two of the most prolific and challenging authorities on the topic of competitive intelligence (CI) reflect on and respond to the changes in the field over the last decade. The authors point out that CI users have to change what they are doing, show why they are doing it, and provide ways of doing it. Their book reviews the problems in the development of CI since the 1980s, discusses the impact of the Internet and the rise in use of other secondary sources, and draws from and provides access to the growing body of CI information, knowledge, and literature.

McGonagle and Vella maintain that competitive intelligence as we know it is just the first step toward the creation of true "corporate intelligence". Their book explores ways in which new channels of communication and new uses of information and intelligence will change corporations, and how these changes can be anticipated in an organization's strategic planning, crisis management, benchmarking, reverse engineering, and defensive intelligence activities. In doing so, they introduce readers to new techniques, such as "shadow benchmarking" and "factual management analysis". Readable, with useful checklists, forms, reminders, and drawings from real world cases, this book will be essential reading for executives in the public and private sectors, and their colleagues in the academic business community.

This is the first book to address the real issues and problems confronting the competitive intelligence industry today. It pinpoints the reason why competitive intelligence is on hold in corporate America and offers practical advice and solutions to position competitive intelligence systems as the systems of choice for intelligence users. The key is to stimulate demand and the author tells us why and how. A "must read" for intelligence providers, for managers and intelligence users, and for management program faculty and students in our colleges and universities.

Responding to the needs of market researchers, business analysts, CI professionals, and others who understand and use the online information resources of the Internet, Vibert provides a structured set of frameworks to help solve business problems fast, successfully, and in real time. He explains how to use the content of specific Web sites to undertake specific tasks, and he provides academics and trainers with a powerful tool to help them develop the online analytical skills of their students, clients, and colleagues. The result is an important resource for executives seeking to protect their own knowledge while gaining insight about their competitors and for academics teaching in such fields as marketing, sales, and product development.

Written for those involved in business, this book looks at the impact of the information revolution and shows how companies can exploit information for competitive advantage. A practical guide which also includes case studies of various organisations.

Scenario-driven planning is a new management technology for strategy design that employs computed or "strategic" scenarios to improve the quality of managerial thinking. Strategic scenarios--the outcomes of modeling strategic situations--produce insight much richer than that expected from environmental scenarios alone. They bring to the consulting and upper-level management audiences a better way of handling strategic uncertainty, providing the tools managers and strategy students need for thinking and dialoguing about complex strategic issues.