Internet Age of Competitive Intelligence

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.

Combining a scholarly approach with hands-on advice, McGonagle and Vella have written the first work to guide CI professionals through the emerging literature of their field. Among the important changes in the field the authors cover are: the radical changes in on line database searching and ways in which the Internet has fundamentally modified how we think of accessing data. Their book explores and reports the major body of work from the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, now that more businesses worldwide are using competitive intelligence and either writing about their experiences with it, or joining in new benchmarking studies. The result is newer information on what really works, what doesn't work, and who is doing what with it. The book is thus a starting point for people new to the field of CI as well as a resource to help experienced professionals do their jobs better.

JOHN J. McGONAGLE is Managing Partner, The Helicon Group, a consulting firm in Blandon, PA. Author or coauthor of 11 business books and numerous articles in business, law, and economics, including Protecting Your Company Against Competitve Intelligence (Greenwood,1998), he has been an adjunct lecturer at Lehigh University and Allentown College, where he developed and taught the course on competitive intelligence. He received the Fellows Award in 1998 from the Society of Competitve Intelligence Professionals.

CAROLYN M. VELLA is Founding Partner of The Helicon Group. She has published widely in the journals serving the business community and on competitive intelligence specifically, and is the author or coauthor of five other books on CI, including A New Archetype for Competitive Intelligence (Quorum,1996). Selected as an Outstanding Woman of America for 1983, she travels widely here and abroad lecturing on CI and other topics.