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Title:
Online Competitive Intelligence: Increase your profits using cyber intelligence
Review:
I started reading Online Competitive Intelligence by Helen Burrell
full of high hopes - but the book turned out to be a bit of a
'curate's egg': excellent in parts but inadequate elsewhere.
Online Competitive Intelligence is divided into four sections:
- An introduction to Competitive Intelligence (CI);
- Choosing & using online sources for CI;
- Organising the research;
- References & appendices.
The first section is the best - giving an overview of CI, and
searching for online information. Burwell discusses the benefits of
paying for information versus using the Internet for free information.
She examines methods for handling projects and seeking information,
and gives good examples on ways of defining competitors and the types
of intelligence that can be found online. I had no problems with
this section, finding it interesting and informative.
The next section should be the meat of the book - but in my view, it
was not thought through sufficiently, and is the weakest part. It
consists of a number of chapters looking at different types of
information. I found the style tedious and repetitive with its
description of numerous sources yet without really explaining the
principles for finding them. This is a major missed opportunity as the
book could have advised on techniques for more effective searching for
sources rather than its "here is one I discovered earlier - now
bookmark it and hope that it never disappears" approach.
On the other hand, to be fair, most readers would not have read
through this section in its entirety, but instead just used it as a
reference section looking up only those aspects that were needed.
Unfortunately, the overall focus is on researching US companies - and
the suggestions for non-US research are eclectic (for example, Burwell
includes just four lines on the UK government's web archive, and
almost nothing on other European official sources: as for Asia and the
Pacific rim areas - these may as well not exist). Considering that
business is now global, I think that this is a significant drawback to
the book.
The third section is good - consisting mainly of a number of templates
that can be used as models for CI reports and profiles as well as
suggestions for finding sources for particular competitor profile
parts. The final section of the book primarily lists several hundred
web-sites. These are broken down by category and notwithstanding the
aforementioned US bias this is still useful as a list of online CI
resources.
The book is a second edition, and I noticed a number of pages that
should (and could) have been updated but weren't - for example in the
first chapter Burwell recommends FT Profile for non-US research. FT
Profile was acquired by Lexis-Nexis in 2000 and the service was
discontinued a few years ago. This is slightly ironic, as on the next page, Burwell correctly says that one way of assessing the quality of online information is by asking if the data is complete and when was it last updated!
In summary - should you buy this book? Well it depends - if you are
based in the US, or this is your primary focus then you would find
this book a great resource for online CI. However if finding
competitive intelligence on US companies is not your thing then you
are likely to be disappointed - as the book fails by not offering
general techniques for finding sources, meaning that you will be
none the wiser when it comes to locating elusive CI information on
other regions.
Free Pint Reviewer:
Arthur Weiss is a UK-based management consultant specialising in
competitive intelligence and strategy. He first started using online
sources for competitive intelligence in the late 1980s and since then
has become expert in all aspects of online research. In 1997 he
offered the first training course on using the Internet for
Competitive Intelligence (at the Online Information Conference) and
has continued offering training courses on this topic. Arthur has
written and presented on competitive intelligence, marketing and
Internet related topics in the UK, Europe, US and elsewhere. Arthur is
the managing partner of AWARE, a CI consultancy offering clients CI
research, analysis and training. He can be contacted through AWARE's
web-site at http://www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk.
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