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The literature of competitive intelligence - The Library in Corporate Intelligence Activities
Library Trends, Fall, 1994 by Thomas D. Walker
INTRODUCTION
Compentitive intelligence (CI) activities are information gathering activities, yet the major portion of the CI literature reside outside the mainstream library and information science literature. Because the field is interdisciplinary, relevant works can also be found in the business and scientific literatures and, perhaps because aspects of CI activities capture the imaginations of nonspecialist readers, one can easily find coverage in newspapers and popular magazines. As implied by some of the preceding articles, the field has remained relatively informal. Practitioners have a variety of educational backgrounds and experience. It is only relatively recently that interested professionals have assembled to share their experiences and promote their activities. The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP--formerly the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals) was founded in 1986 and currently has about 1,600 members. Of interest to CI researchers and practitioners is its quarterly journal, The Competitive Intelligence Review, with a circulation of about 2,000, and a membership newsletter, The Competitive Intelligencer.
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BIBLIOGRAPHIC ACCESS
Appropriate indexes include ABI/Inform, Business Periodicals Index, and other standard business, business news, and news indexes, as well as ERIC, Library Literature, and Library and Information Science Abstracts. A regular feature of the Competitive Intelligence Review, the "Competitive Intelligence Library," by Bonnie Hohhof, serves the readership as a current awareness tool. It provides bibliographic citations, brief abstracts, and book reviews. Sable (1985) compiled a large bibliography of works (articles, books, and dissertations) about industrial espionage and trade secrets. Valuable literature discussions are supplied by relevant dissertations and other large-scale research projects. Several of the books discussed later provide bibliographic access in the form of lists of recommended readings. While several of them are designated "bibliographies," perhaps the best is a "select bibliography" by Roukis, Conway, and Charnov (1990) with over 300 books--some on intelligence practices in general--and 178 articles (pp. 295-315). A useful review of the environmental scanning literature has been provided by Choo and Auster (1993).
SUBJECT ACCESS TO COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE AND RELATED TOPICS
The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) (1993) supplies a scope note for "business intelligence" (vol. 1, p. 666) which, with "issues management" (vol. 2, p. 2445) are the two relevant terms that are official headings. Linked to this term, and illustrating some of the problems with terminology, are seven "used for" terms:
* business espionage;
* corporate intelligence;
* espionage, business;
* espionage, industrial;
* industrial espionage;
* intelligence, business; and
* intelligence, corporate.
The terms, especially those referring to espionage, are not synonymous with "business intelligence." Similar problems are expressed among the broader topics:
* business ethics;
* competition, unfair; and
* industrial management.
Note that several legitimate activities are expressed by these terms, although they are not distinguished from one another. Others imply unethical or illegal information-gathering activities that have little to do with accepted practices of intelligence gathering. "Competitive intelligence" itself is not an established term in LCSH. For works about environmental scanning, LCSH refers to the term "organizational environment." For information seekers in this area, it is important to recognize the limitations of these subject headings.
A brief study of the competitive intelligence literature as reflected in ABI/Inform, a major business database, was carried out to answer the following questions:
* Which of the terms under consideration for this issue of Library
Trends appear as terms in the subject fields of the database's records?
* Which of the terms appear in title or abstract fields?
* Do sets of articles retrieved by the individual terms coincide with
each other, or do terms retrieve sets with little overlap which might
indicate they have more distinct definitions?
The search covered the CD-ROM version of the database from January 1987 through June 1994 and considered the following terms: "business intelligence," "competitive intelligence," "competitor intelligence," "environmental scanning," and "issues management." Combinations including the term "strategic," such as "strategic intelligence," yielded articles in this and other databases, but many articles were concerned with military, rather than business, aspects of intelligence-gathering activities. Two terms appeared in the subject fields of the ABI/Inform records--"competitive intelligence" and "environmental scanning." The others appeared in abstract or title fields. Table 1 lists the terms and the number of articles retrieved for each for the period.
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