CI Software: Surveying the blurry landscape
Jinfo Blog

By Scott Brown

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At the SLA Conference in New Orleans in June, I was struck by how much buzz there was around the topic of competitive intelligence. I heard it mentioned by SLA CEO Janice Lachance. I heard CI topics and skills referenced and discussed in several conference sessions – and not just those offered by the six-year-old SLA CI Division. It seems as if CI is increasingly on everyone’s mind.

What really took me by surprise is hearing CI legend Jan Herring recognise the skills librarians and information professionals bring to the CI table, including project management, analysis and insight. (I always knew this, but it was good to hear it from Jan.) Jan went on to say that the most significant skill deficiency, for both CI and information professionals, is knowledge of analytical software.

This comment echoed recent discussions on a LinkedIn group for the newly-renamed Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) association. One discussion thread was started by a practitioner looking for recent comparative information for CI software - and nothing seemed to be available. Just within the last few days, another thread popped up on the list - and still, the answer is, there are no comparative reports available out there.

For several years, Fuld & Company produced a highly-regarded annual review of CI software, called the Intelligence Software Report®, which provided CI software analysis and comparison. However, that has been removed as of 2009 (PDF comment here).

Why did they stop producing the report? Fuld started offering to 'qualified companies', free of charge, their SharePoint CI Portal, which, according to the Fuld site, presented a conflict of interest to the software firms who provided their information to Fuld to produce the annual Report. The CI software firms felt that Fuld was giving away a template to build an alternative to their products, and so Fuld stopped publishing the Report. 

The loss of the Fuld Report, however, doesn't mean that the desire for CI software reviews has gone away. As mentioned above, the SCIP LinkedIn discussion thread to find comparative information for CI software lamented the fact that the Fuld report no longer exists, and nothing has taken its place. A consistent perspective and resource for making sense of this space no longer seems to exist.

In response to this gap, VIP has begun a series of reports on currently available CI software products. In October 2009, VIP published a report on Digimind 7. One way we are attempting to clear the fog around CI tools is to consider CI software categories from the perspective of the competitive intelligence cycle. In a simplified version, there are four stages in the CI cycle:

• Planning and direction (including requirements)


• Collection


• Analysis


• Dissemination

There are certainly many tools that specifically address the Collection or Analysis pieces of the cycle. For the purposes of the reports, and as we look at CI software, we will consider a 'dedicated CI software product' to be a product that fulfills more than one piece of the intelligence cycle. All of the top solutions in this category aid in collection, analysis and dissemination. In the Digimind 7 report, for example, reviewer Jonathan Gordon-Till discusses the software's capability of creating ready-made reports for senior managers, along with its collection and analysis capabilities. Solutions like Comintelli's Knowledge XChanger have more of an emphasis on knowledge management, and also tout analysis and collaboration features.

Over the next few months we'll look at some of these solutions in depth. We'd also like to get your input. Are there particular tools you'd like to see reviewed? Are there areas in the CI software space that are confounding? Let us know your view of the landscape.    

If you want to be sure to get VIP product reviews on CI products, take a trial subscription to VIP now, and you'll get the next installment upon publication in December 2010, or request samples to learn more about VIP Reports on Products before you trial.

A longer version of this article appeared in VIP Magazine, September 2010, No. 82. Purchase VIP No. 82 now in the FreePint Shop.

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