External Business Environment Analysis with RSS/Web

The purpose of this article is to introduce the system that analyzes external business environment utilizing RSS or web news. The proposed system will visualize positioning of companies in an industry. The positioning analysis shows the company priority issues in changing market. Conventionally, such information is collected and regenerated manually by analysts. Our technique retrieves RSS or web news, applies characteristic analysis for each sentence in the content, evaluates the sentences with business rules, and performs macro analysis based on the Five Forces analysis. This technique will grasp competitive powers of companies in the specific industry and will discover the differentiation factors of the company. The authors apply the proposed system to the optical network industry, and the system revealed that rivalry among the existing competitors was the most influential force in the industry.