Issue Of JISIB Research Articles

The internet is leading the world towards forms of totalitarianism: How to fix the problem

It is difficult to imagine intelligence studies as separate from information technology as we enter thethird decade of the 21st century. The current issue of JISIB bears witness to this integration with a strongfocus on big data applications.Hardly anyone today would or could do without the internet, but the project that started with USgovernment financing in the 1960s, with packet switching, and in the 1970s with ARPANET and sawcommercial light in the 1990s is helping countries turn into totalitarian systems where totalitarianism isdefined by a high degree of control over public and private life.Public life is influenced by hacking, troll factories, fake news/propaganda, and interference inelections. Private life is influenced by massive surveillance. To borrow the title of the book by Zuboff(2019) we now live in “the age of surveillance capitalism”. Business intelligence systems lie at the heartof this transformation, but so do artificial intelligence and robotics. And the trend is global.In the West the suppressors are mostly private monopolies (e.g. Google, Facebook), while in the Eastit is primarily the government that is snooping (e.g. China’s Social Credit System). Face recognition islikely to become as popular in the West as it is in the East. It is also easily forgotten that no city wasbetter surveilled than London, which started to build its CCTV technology in the 1960s. The system isnow being updated with facial recognition, just like the one we are criticizing the Chinese for having.Some forms of surveillance may also lead to great advances in our societies, like access to governmentforms and statements electronically and a non-anonymous Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), whichpromises to reduce corruption and tax fraud, and could be used for easy distribution of universal basicincome (UBI) . Fintech promises to be highly disruptive.We are moving into an Orwellian world of surveillance more or less voluntarily, often applauding it.“I have nothing to hide” the young man says, but then he later becomes a minister and starts to worryabout the traces he has left on keyboards. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance, or any other major service,can pull out extensive analyses of behavior and personality on most of us now as we continue to exchangeour personal data for access to searches and social media, but also subscription-based services. MostChinese think that the social credit system is a good thing. This is for much of the same reason: theybelieve it will not be used against them and think that they will do well. We all tend to be overoptimisticabout our abilities and opportunities. It’s not before we fail that the full implications of the system arefelt: lack of access, credit, housing, and no more preferential treatments. The result threatens to worsenthe lack of social mobility and increase the growing conflict between the super-rich and those hundredsof millions who risk slipping from the middle class to being counted among the poor, many of whom livein the Western world.

Social media intelligence

Social media intelligence

What role does technology play for intelligence studies at the start of the 21st century?

All articles published in this issue show the role technology plays for intelligence studies in business. We see how patents can be used for competitive and business intelligence, how datamining and software can be used for geoeconomics, how it may measure the success of open source innovation indifferent cultures, how business intelligence software can be evaluated using fuzzy PROMETHEE and how software and the internet are used for economic and industrial espionage. Singh writes on geoeconomics on a micro scale, the question about where a business should be located geographically to be economically viable. The author presents a new geospatial methodologicalapproach using census data. ArcGIS software is used as a geospatial analytics tool for hotspot analysis and for producing maps.Deshpande, Ahmed, and Khode’s article entitled “Business intelligence evaluation model in enterprise systems using fuzzy PROMETHEE” presents a new model to evaluate business intelligence for enterprise systems.The article by Capatina, Bleoju, Yamazaki and Nistor show how strategic intelligence solutions, once performed in a collaborative culture environment, will lead to the improvement of the partners’ managerial competences and will act as enablers for competitive positioning, proving the added-value ofthe acquired know-how through open innovation practices. The article by Maadi, Javidnia and Khatami shows how patents can be used as a source of informationfor competitive/business intelligence to highlight the technological trends in the field of energy efficient cooling of data centers. As such it is a good applied example for how patent analysis can be done in a specific industry.The last article entitled “Economic and industrial espionage at the start of the 21st century – Status quaestionis” is by Solberg Søilen. It is an attempt to define where the field of economic and industrial espionage is today, more than ten years after the author wrote a dissertation on the subject. As always, we would above all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB. Thanks to Dr. Allison Perrigo for reviewing English grammar and helping with layout

User perspectives on business intelligence

The research articles in this issue are related to business intelligence in one way or another. The article by Salmas, Alebpour and Homayounvala is entitled “Identification and classification of organizational level competencies for BI success”. In their research the authors have identified competencies that can be used as a measure to evaluate an organization’s status with regards to business intelligence success. Since the study done by Adamala and Cidrin (2011) this journal has shown a strong interest in user evaluations of business intelligence systems. The article by Ghasemi and Rowshan presents a new approach to the early warning literature. Entrepreneurs are the group that more than anyone else are seeking out early insights and also rewarded by their ability to look ahead. In the literature this is known as “entrepreneurial alertness.” Science can never accept that some people are simply born entrepreneurs or have “eureka” moments: we want to understand why and how. From an intelligence perspective picking up early signals can be seen as a signal for which entrepreneurs to follow and listen to. The ability to gather data from socialmedia through the use of BI tools should make this possible once these entrepreneurs are identified. The article by Ghasemi and Rowshan does not go in this direction, but such research would be welcome in the future.The article by Avner entitled “Study on competitive intelligence in Isreal: 2016 update” is a status report for competitive intelligence within Israeli firms. The results are compared with a study conducted by the same author in 2006. The study shows that there has been no significant change in CI practices in Israel during the past ten years. It also confirms that competitive intelligence is primarily a tool used by larger organizations. This means that Israeli companies have been slower to adopt new business intelligence software, and this is something that respondents see as a problem.The article by Solberg Søilen entitled “Users’ perception of data as a service (DaaS)” is an investigation into a new market related to business intelligence. On one hand this is a survey addressing one particular type of users—namely market intelligence (MI), competitive intelligence (CI) and businessintelligence (BI) professionals and experts—and their preferences. On the other hand, this is a critical analysis about the consequences of the issues addressed by users. It is also an attempt to present DaaS in a shorter historical perspective.The case study on Qoros automotive manufacturing by Ahmadinia and Karim is an analysis of how the company could enter the European market. It has now been more than a year since JISIB decided to publish case studies as articles. The Qorors case is not only a good teaching case, but is also a goodillustration of how intelligence topics can be tied to marketing questions and the larger question about competitive advantage.As always, we would above all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB. Since the beginning of the year the journal has been supported by a three year grant from the Swedish Research Council (VR). This has allowed us to increase the quality in layout design and review theEnglish grammar.

The width and scope of intelligence studies in business

If the last issue of JISIB was a special issue where the discipline was reflecting on itself, then this issues shows some of the width and scope of the field. The conceptual article by Nienaber and Sewdass presents a relatively new concept of workforce intelligence, and links it to competitive advantage by way of predictive analytics. The article by Solberg Søilen is an attempt to lay out a broad scientific agenda for the area of intelligence studies in business.Empirical findings come from a survey, but in the discussion the author argues for why the study should define itself as much broader than what the survey data implies, breaking out of the current dominating scientific paradigm. The article by Fourati-Jamoussi and Niamba is an updated evaluation of business intelligence tools, a frequently reoccurring topic. However, this time it is not a simple evaluation of existing software, but an evaluation by users to helpdesigners of business intelligence tools get the best efficiency out of a monitoring process. The article by Calof is an evaluation of government sponsored competitive intelligence for regional and sectoral economic development in Canada. The article concludes that it is possible tocalculate positive economic impacts from these activities. Rodríguez Salvador and Hernandez de Menéndez come back to a field that has become a specialty for Rodríguez Salvador: scientific and industrial intelligence based on scientometric patent analysis. This time she looks at bio-additive manufacturing using advanced data mining software and interviews with experts.

EDITORIAL NOTE VOL 5, NO 3 (2015)

This is a special issue of JISIB where the discipline is allowed to reflect on itself. Included are three articles which aims to take a new critical look at the discipline of Competitive Intelligence and its equivalents in other cultures. Degerstedt rethinks the whole discipline of CI and IS seen from a larger sociological and technical perspective which in many ways resembles ideas of Social Intelligence introduced by Stevan Dedijer. Solberg Søilen bases his reflections about the scientific standing of intelligence in business around a survey with two questions: What is unique for CI and IS as disciplines and what analyses are unique for Ci and IS? The article by Hoppe was presented at the ECIS conference in Stockholm in 2009 and submitted to the new journal of JISIB in 2011.As always we would first of all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB.On behalf of the Editorial Board,

Editorial Notes VOL 5, No 2 (2015)

EDITORIAL NOTE VOL 5, NO 2 (2015)It is always a pleasure to realize, at the time of writing this editorial note, that the articles published by JISIB come from many parts of the world and from many industries. This is not intentionally - even though we strive for diversity - as we do not know what articles actually make it through the review process for each issue. Our rejection rate is now more than 80%. Some see that as a sign of quality. In this issue of JISIB we publish three articles on Intelligence Studies presented at the ECKM 2015 conference. There is also an article by Oubrich et al. presented at the AIM 2015 conference. In addition ASA du Toit gives an updated analysis of the Intelligence Studies field.As always we would first of all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB.On behalf of the Editorial Board, Sincerely Yours,

EDITORIAL NOTE VOL 5, NO 1 (2015)

In this issue of JISIB we bring you articles from two different conferences held this spring. The first was the 7th International Competitive Intelligence (ICI) conference held in Strasburg 25-26th March. The second was the IT Management Annual (AIM) conference held in Rabat May 20-22. The journal would like to thank the organizers of these conferences for a fruitful cooperation, where JISIB editors have served as reviewers of scientific track papers and best paper awards.To keep up with the journals new aim to publish case studies Calof et al. present the story of Nortel, a Canadian telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer which went bankrupt in 2009.As always we would first of all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB.On behalf of the Editorial Board,

Editorial Note Vol 4, No 1 (2014)

EDITORIAL NOTE VOL 4, NO 1 (2014)On May 3rd 2014 JISIB received an email saying it has been accepted to be indexed by SCOPUS Elsevier. Thus a vital goal for the journal has been achieved. The SCOPUS acceptance will automatically allow us to enter a number of other indexes used by different nations for their individual rankings, which we again expect will increase the number and quality of submissions. The next goal of the journal is to be accepted to Reuter’s ISI Web of Knowledge. Experience with other journals however show that this may take some time, also after official criteria are fulfilled as ISI are looking at the number of times the applicant has been cited by their existing journals. There is no reliable way to keep track of this figure from our side as Reuter’s do not say how many citations are required. Instead we will file and application during the year and keep at it with regular intervals. Open Source journals are highly appreciated by users and we are convinced that they are here to stay.In this issue of JISIB we have admitted a large number of opinion pieces. Opinion pieces are important to allow for a broader perspective of the field in terms of policies, adaptions of CI in foreign countries and general interest in the form of debates. It also shows the normative qualities that are present in any social science discipline.In the first article Marisela Rodriguez, Alejandro Palacios and Dante Cortez Show how CI can help define a business opportunity or threats to the open die forging industry. They show how the methodology can be combined with other types of analysis (market analysis, Porter five forces, etc.) to enrich and make the process of strategic decision-making more precise. Victor Cavaller shows the correlation between knowledge translation (KT) and CI in the perspective of university students. Cavallar concludes with a classification of Analytical parameters for learning and teaching. Luc Quoniam and Charles-Victor Boutet reflects on how the CI Cycle changes with Web 2.0. The article by Julyeta P.A Runtuwene, Audy Aldrin Kenap and Verry Ronny Palilingan shows a case of how CI is implemented in the region of North Sulawesi, Indonesia. The article by Abdelkader Baaziz and Luc Quoniam discuss the situation of Algerian State-Owned Firms and come up with a conceptual model of how BI, CI and KM are related in a decision making framework.As always we would first of all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB.On behalf of the Editorial Board,Sincerely Yours,Dr. Klaus Solberg SøilenHalmstad University

EDITORIAL NOTE VOL 3, NO 3 (2013)

The journal continues to draw mainly on articles presented at academic conferences on topics related to competitive intelligence. In 2013 SCIP organized a first conference in South Africa, under the leadership of ASA du Toit, the journal’s editor for Africa.The first article by Agostino et al. entitled “Cloud solution in Business Intelligence for SMEs –vendor and customer perspectives“ identifies key success factor for SMEs of cloud based Business Intelligence products. Most important KSFs identified in this study were the level of software functionalities, the ubiquitous access to data, responsive answers to customer support requests, handling large amounts of data and implementation cost. The study also shows that SMEs prefer industry tailored software, monthly or quarterly billings, and contact by email or phone for service.The second article by Helen N. Rothberg and G. Scott Erickson entitled “Intelligence in the Oil Patch: Knowledge Management and Competitive Intelligence Insights” argue with extensive empirical data and examples from oil-based industries that practitioners are one step ahead of academia in the sense that many organizations have a connection between their knowledge management and competitive intelligence functions. While the natural inclination of most working in the fields of KM and CI is that more is always better, both theory and practice suggest that sometimes a more measured approach may be better, the authors conclude. The third article by Esteves and Curto entitled “A Risk and Benefits Behavioral Model to Assess Intentions to Adopt Big Data” develops a model that predicts the intention to adopt Big Data technologies. The article by Salvador and Casanoa entitled “Applying Competitive Intelligence: The Case of Thermoplastics Elastomers” provides a practical case of the Competitive Intelligence Methodology applied to the Thermoplastics Elastomers Industry, specifically within the Styrenic Block Copolymers category. The authors identify a solution for a Mexican Company to support their decision-making process. The last article by Kabir and Carayannis entitled “Big Data, Tacit Knowledge and Organizational Competitiveness” show how big data is a source of firm’s competitive advantage.As always we would first of all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB.

Editorial note 2013 Vol 3 No 2

The sixth issue of JISIB marks the journal’s second anniversary. Again we are delighted to welcome contributions by academics from so many different countries, with so many different backgrounds. The academic contributions of our female authors continue to show also in this issue. If this issue should have one common theme it would be related to Brazil. It is not a special issue on Brazil, but we saw the possibility to include three articles which relates to the experience of competitive intelligence in this country. However, the first article by Sheila Wright, Christophe Bisson, and Alistair Duffy entitled “Competitive Intelligence and Information Technology Adoption of SMEs in Turkey: Diagnosing Current Performance and Identifying Barriers“ is on another topic and deals with SMEs need to improve intelligence-based output to decision-makers. Based on empirical findings the aim has been to identify and classify CI behaviour and attitudes of SMEs in Turkey.The second article by A.S.A. du Toit is entitled “Comparative Study of Competitive Intelligence Practices between Two Retail Banks in Brazil and South Africa” , where it is concluded that respondents in the bank in Brazil cope better with changes in the external environment.The next article by Zhanna Abzaltynova and Janice Williams entitled “Developments in Business Intelligence Software” is an evaluation of BI vendors and software with extensive rankings.The article by Francisco Carlos Paletta entitled “Brazil - Evolutions in CI and some aspects of a current scenario”, is a summary of research done on the introduction of competitive intelligence in Brazil. The article also gives a brief idea about its current status.In the opinion section we have included an article by Francisco Carlos Paletta and Nilson Dias Vieira Junior entitled “ICT Lifecycle and its Major Role in The Development of Strategic Intelligence”. It is an evaluation of the existing ICT framework for competitive intelligence in Brazil.As always we would first of all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB.

EDITORIAL NOTE VOL 2, NO 2 (2012)

The third issue of JISIB marks the journal’s first anniversary. Again we are delighted to welcome contributions by academics from all over the world, from so many different backgrounds. We also delighted to have contributions from a large number of female authors. This together shows, we believe, that the field of intelligence studies has a truly global reach.Most contributions continue to come from best papers from a number of conferences related to Intelligence Studies. For the articles in this issue we would like to thank in particular our American Editor, Prof. G. Scott Erickson. Four out of six articles this time come from ECKM 2012, which was held 6-7 September in Cartagena, Spain. Track co-chairs for the Mini Track on Competitive Intelligence and KM was G. Scott Erickson, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY and Helen N. Rothberg, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York.The article by Brigitte Gay shows how graphs can be used to illustrate and understand relations between organizations and companies. It illustrates well the degree to which the field of Competitive Intelligence relies heavily today on the development of new software. The article by Scott Ericson and Helen Rothberg clarifies much around the importance of knowledge assets and the study of Knowledge Management with that of Competitive Intelligence. Few have done more to understand this area than these two authors. Their findings have also been published in a new book this year, “Intelligence in action” (Palgrave Macmillan). The contribution by Jihene Chebbi Ghannay and Zeineb Ben Ammar Mamlouk Zeineb is a literature review that shows the same interdependence between CI and KM. The article by Olivier Mamavi shows what you can do with graphs to identify and understand networks for problems containing big data, in this case companies who have obtained French procurement contracts. The article by Gabriela López, Steve Eldridge, Salomón Montejano and Patricia Silva shows how to improve supply chain knowledge by a continuous evaluation and contextualization of a company’s own practices. The last article by Mattias Nyblom, Jenny Behrami, Tung Nikkilä and Klaus Solberg Søilen is an investigation into what kind of Business Intelligence software is used by SMEs, why, and how companies evaluate their systems. As such its aim is to narrow a gap between theory and practice.On behalf of the Editorial Board,Sincerely Yours,Dr. Klaus Solberg Søilen