An intelligence/business report.
Description: An intelligence/business report. Your standpoint is that you are a researcher hired by an organization to provide a detailed analysis of a particular UK company and its competitive position in the industry it operates in or, in the case of a diverse company, one of its key markets. You will choose a company to work on from the list provided. No more than 10 students may choose the same company. The final report should include a synthesis and integration of your research, and also conclusions and recommendations.
You will choose to research a UK company from an approved list, available on MOLE supplied by the module coordinator. You will select the appropriate analytical technique(s) to examine and analyze the company’s situation. Resources from online databases, the web, expert opinions, and any other appropriate print or online resources may be used. You will have to review and evaluate the materials you find, extract what you think are important trends, and analyse and synthesize information to construct a final report. Students will need to familiarize themselves with their chosen company as soon as possible.
Your report must contain the following sections
o Executive Summary outlining the main points that you have included in your report.
o Introduction to the company including basic contact details, address, number of employees, an overview of the key products or services.
o Key financial information including for example:
? A visual representation of the last five years of the company’s financial performance drawing data
from FAME / the annual report;
? Your analysis of the financial health of the company drawing on the published financial results,
financial news sources, and key commentators;
? Use of key financial ratios to compare the company with its competitors (if possible)
o Industry and competitor analysis including for example:
? Overview of the industry sector in which your company is active, including key competitors
(If your company has diverse interests, select one aspect to focus on, preferably the one in which it
is most active).
? Analysis of the industry as a whole and your company’s position in it.
? What Social, Economic, Political and Economic, Legal and Environmental factors affect this industry?
? How does your company’s social media presence compare with it’s competitors?
Coursework Part 2: Intelligence Report
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o Key issues affecting the company at the present time including for example:
? An analysis and synthesis of the current news stories about the company – what issues are they
currently facing?
? How is the company represented through Social Media? What is being said about the company on
social media channels?
? Have there been any official investigations into this company?
? What are the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats?
o Market analysis including for example:
? What is the target market for this organisations products/services e.g. who buys these products and
what do we know about them?
? What social trends affect this market?
? What can you find out about the consumers of this company from social media channels?
? How effectively does this company engage with it’s consumers on social media?
o Conclusion summarising the main points of analysis.
o Recommendations for a potential investor Is this a good company to invest in based on the company’s
strength of position within its industry or key market.
In your report you MUST identify the source of all your information. Any bibliographic material should be in APA style in accordance with the student handbook.
Appendix You may also want to include lengthier sections of, for example, the company report or other sources that you refer to in your report, or lengthier sections of analyses (e.g. financial) that you refer to in your report.
N.B. You will be expected to synthesize material from a wide range of resources such as news stories, market research, official statistics and the trade press.

Readings
Note that
? You are not expected to read all the items: this list enables you to follow up topics of interest, or areas
where you need to learn more
? Further specialist items will be added as the semester progresses
Fleisher, C. S.& Benoussan, B.E. (2007). Business and competitive analysis: effective application of new and classic methods. Philadelphia, Pa. : London
Holmes, G., Sugden, A. & Gee, P. (2008). Interpreting Company Reports and Accounts. 10th Ed. London, England: . Financial Times/Prentice Hall. (the 9th edition is in the library)
Maguire, S. & H. Suluo. (2007). Business intelligence: Benefits, applications, and challenges. In M. Xu (Ed.) Managing Strategic Intelligence: Techniques and Technologies. (pp.14-34). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Nutting, D. (2012). Surviving and thriving in the corporate world: A guide for information professionals. Business Information Review, 29(4), 221–223.
Schachter, D. (2005). Competitive advantage and information services. Information Outlook, 9 (4) 12-13. Business Information sources and trends
Brown, S. (2015). Delivering value: A US perspective on the 25th Business Information Survey. Business Information Review, 32(2), 100-102.
Ojala, M. (2013). Looking under streetlights: where business information can hide. Online Searcher, 37(5), 68-70.
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Reuser, AP (2013). Trends in the current information landscape and their significance for researchers. Online Searcher, 37(1), 51-55.
Environmental scanning
Abels, E. (2002). Hot topics: Environmental scanning. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 28 (3) 16-17.
Aguilar, F. J. (1967). Scanning the Business Environment. New York: MacMillan Company.
Choo, C.W. (2002) Information management for the intelligent organization: the art of scanning the environment. 3rd ed. Medford, NJ : Published for the American Society for Information Science by Information Today. His web site is also recommended at http://choo.fis.utoronto.ca/.
Haase, H. & Franco, M. (2011). Information sources for environmental scanning: do industry size and firm size matter? Management decision, 49(10) 1642-1657.
Lau, R, Liao, S, Wong, K, & Chiu, D (2012). Web 2.0 environmental scanning and adaptive decision support for business mergers and acquisitions. MIS Quarterly, 36(4). 1239-A6.
du Toit, A. (2016). Using environmental scanning to collect strategic information: A South African survey. International Journal of Information Management, 36(1), 16–24
Zhang, X., Majid, S. Foo, S. (2012). Environmental Scanning: an emerging discipline for LIS education. In A. Spink and D. Singh. (Eds.) Library and information science trends and research: Asia-Oceania. (pp.125-147). Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. DOI 10.1108/S1876-0562(2011)002011b008
Competitive Intelligence
Agnihotri, R., & Rapp, A. (2011). Perspectives on competitive intelligence within business: A tactical tool for sales- people to gain a competitive advantage. Marketing Review, 11(4), 363-380
Bombardier, S. and Werts, C. E. (2005). On the job with the CI researcher: “industrial espionage is not the right way to phrase it”. Information Outlook,. 9 (4) 18-21.
Fader,P. & Elkind, J. (2012). Open the blinds: a new model transforms site-centric data into competitive intelligence. Marketing research, 24(2) 16-22.
Johns, P. & Van Doren, D. (2010). Competitive intelligence in service marketing: a new approach with practical application. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 28(5), 551-570
Kendrick, T. (2007). The winning mindset: effective competitive intelligence research on the internet. Business Information Review, 24(4), 228-235.
Murphy, C. (2005). Competitive intelligence: gathering, analysing and putting it to work. Aldershot, England: Gower. Murphy, C. (2006). Competitive intelligence: what corporate documents can tell you. Business Information Review, 23
(1), 35-42.
Saayman, A., et al. (2008). Competitive intelligence: construct exploration, validation and equivalence. Aslib
Proceedings: New Information Perspectives, 60(4), 383-411.
Sassi, B., et al. (2015). Competitive intelligence: History, importance, objectives, process and issues. In 2015 IEEE 9th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science. (pp.486-491). DOI: 10.1109/RCIS.2015.7128910
du Toit, A. (2015). Competitive intelligence research: An investigation of trends in the literature. Journal of Intelligence Studies in Business, 5(2), 14-21. https://ojs.hh.se/index.php/JISIB/article/view/127
Zheng, Z., Fader, P. & Padmanhaban, B. (2012). From Business Intelligence to Competitive Intelligence: inferring competitive measures using augmented site-centric data. Information systems research, 23(3), 698 – 720.
Social media
Brown, S. (2011). Social media for company research: A few of the best tools. Business Information Review, 28(3), 163-174
Brown, S. (2012). Social Information: Gaining competitive and business advantage using social media tools. Oxford, England: Chandos
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Chua, A. Y., & Banerjee, S. (2013). Customer knowledge management via social media: The case of Starbucks. Journal of Knowledge Management, 17(2), 237 – 249
Fawley, N. (2013). LinkedIn as an information source for human resources, competitive intelligence. Online Searcher, 37(2), 31-50,
He, W. et al. (2015). Gaining competitive intelligence from social media data: Evidence from two largest retail chains in the world. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 115(9),1622 – 1636
He, W.; Zha, S. & Li, L. (2013). Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study of the pizza industry. International Journal of Information management, 33, 464-472.
Lipizzi, C., Iandoli, L., & Marquez, J. (2015). Extracting and evaluating conversational patterns in social media: A socio- semantic analysis of customers? reactions to the launch of new products using Twitter streams. International Journal of Information Management, 35(4), 490–503
O?Flynn, S. (2011). RSS to monitor business threats. Business information Review, 28(2), 83-91
Pikas, C. K. (2005). Blog searching for competitive intelligence, brand image, and reputation management. Online,
29(4), 16-21.
Shao, W., Ross, M. and Grace, D. (2015). Developing a motivation-based segmentation typology of Facebook users. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 33(7), 1071 – 1086.
Big data and analytics
Chen, H., Chiang, R. & Storey, V. (2012). Business intelligence and analytics: from big data to big impact. MIS Quarterly, 36(4), 1165-1188.
Davenport, T.H. (2014). Big data @work: Dispelling the myths, uncovering the opportunities. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Review Press
Fahey, L. (2009) Exploring “analytics” to make better decisions: the questions executives need to ask. Strategy & Leadership, 37(5), 12 – 18
Vaughan, L. & You, J. (2011). Exploring web data for competitive intelligence: the case of the femtocell sector. Advances In Competitiveness Research, 19(1/2),: 37-49.
Data visualisation and Infographics
Kirk, A. (2012). Data Visualisation: a successful design process. Packt Publishing (e-book)
Lankow, J., Ritchie, J. & Crooks, R. (2012). Infographics. London, England: John Wiley & Sons. (e-book) Business strategy
Ahmad, A. (2015), Business intelligence for sustainable competitive advantage. In M. Quaddus and A.G. Woodside (Eds.) Sustaining competitive advantage via business intelligence, knowledge management, and system dynamics. (pp. 3-220). Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Choo, C.W. (2006). The Knowing Organization: How Organizations Use Information to Construct Meaning, Create Knowledge, and Make Decisions. 2nd Ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Liebowitz, J. (2006). Strategic intelligence; business intelligence, competitor intelligence and knowledge management. Boca Raton, Fl.: Auerbach Publications.
Little, B. (2012). The value – and changing face – of business intelligence: an interview with David Abramson, Director of Product Management at LogiXML. Strategic Direction, 28(8), 33 – 35
Marchand, D. (2000). Competing with Information. London, England: John Wiley.
Porter, M. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy. Harvard Business Review, 86(1), 78-93, 137.
Rostami, N. (2014). Integration of Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management: a literature review. Journal of Intelligence Studies in Business, 4(2), 30-40.
Xu, M. (2007). Managing strategic intelligence: techniques and technologies. Hersley, P.A.: Information Science Reference.

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