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Since 1998, Fuld & Company has continuously evaluated software packages with potential competitive intelligence applications. This year for the first time we incorporated the Global CI Benchmarking survey, containing a self-assessment of over 480 companies on a range of attributes critical to their competitive intelligence program, to understand how these companies view their own use of technology. No doubt you will find some of the analysis surprising.
As in past reviews, for the 2008/2009 Intelligence Software Report® we assessed the approximately one-dozen products through vendor interviews, product demonstrations, vendor-produced training sessions, and customer surveys. We evaluated the software packages with regard to the five steps of the Intelligence Cycle. We first had to distinguish between packages that promoted themselves as Business Intelligence (BI) vs. CI tools. Business Intelligence software, as the industry labels many of its products, typically deals with data warehouses and quantitative analysis, almost exclusively of a company’s internal data (e.g. CRM, customer relationship management data). The CI process depends heavily on the collection and analysis of qualitative information that includes both internally-generated and externally-available data; therefore we eliminated most of the self-described BI software tools before beginning our in-depth evaluations.
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