Competitive intelligence on the World Wide Web

Addresses the increasingly important role of competitive intelligence in today´s and tomorrow´s organizations. Organizations are using the Web for marketing and business transactions. Because the Web has emerged as a strategic communication tool and a vast database of information, I discuss how organizations may gather competitive intelligence on the Web and what they must do to guard against divulging your organization´s secrets. Further, the fact that the Web is accessible in a distributed setting makes it a viable choice for hosting a competitive intelligence system that employees can access from all over the world (assuming that they have an Internet connection). I discuss how organizations can develop such a system and deploy it on the Web, and I discuss communication professionals´ role in the design and implementation of this system and their contributions to the competitive intelligence project. This paper should be valuable to communication professionals because it addresses the fundamental concern of how information is gathered, codified, distributed and used. The paper addresses a broad scope of issues related to competitive intelligence but focuses on the specific communication challenges of the Web