posted on 2017-02-09, 15:06authored byTemilade Adefioye Aina, Louise Cooke, Derek Stephens
Competitive intelligence (CI) is important for businesses to remain competitive. Software technologies have been developed to make the CI process simpler. These software technologies need to be able to carry out CI effectively by performing all the stages in the CI Cycle, conforming to the British Standard software quality characteristics, extract
information from large data sets by having certain Additional Features and be cost effective. Three evaluation frameworks were developed based on the CI Cycle, British Standard and Additional Features. This methodology and the marketing literature of the software were used to evaluate four CI software packages. Information on cost and availability of a free trial version was also taken from the marketing literature. From the evaluation results, the software were able to support at least one CI Cycle stage and at least one British Standard characteristics but none of them fully had any of the Additional Features. One of them has a free trial version, while two of them had information about the cost of their commercial version. It is recommended that before choosing CI software, CI practitioners determine and prioritize their intelligence needs and then test which CI software can meet them. Also, CI software vendors need to provide more information in their marketing literature on the cost and availability of a free trial version of their software and features pertaining to the CI Cycle, British Standard and Additional Features. The British Standard and Additional Features have not been used in the
previous CI software evaluation studies.
History
School
Business and Economics
Department
Business
Published in
Business Information Review
Volume
33
Issue
4
Pages
211 - 220 (10)
Citation
AINA, T.A., COOKE, L. and STEPHENS, D., 2016. Methodology for evaluating CI software packages. Business Information Review, 33 (4), pp. 211-220.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2016-08-12
Publication date
2016-12-22
Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Business Information Review and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0266382116675249.