1. Term Project: Competitive Intelligence Shanna Caines Principles of Searching Term Project

2. Carolyn O’Hara MLIS degree Working professional in: Competitive intelligence Biographical research on executives User

3. “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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. Academic sources, but with a different scope Newspapers Newsletters Blogs Magazines Press releases, etc. Lexis Nexis and Factiva

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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…

13. 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