Customer Reviews

Millennium Intelligence: Understanding and Conducting Competitive Intelligence in the Digital Age

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Millennium Intelligence written by Jerry Miller and his friends at the Business Intelligence Braintrust offers a new look at competitive intelligence and information resources that merits serious consideration.

This book offers its readers insight into why companies want to know about each other, what the benefits of such research are, and how it can best be performed. Some reasons are obvious. Companies want to remain competitive and want to know what their competitors are doing. Are their competitors' products and services superior? Are their products being more economically produced? What are the latest and most effective marketing strategies? Are their own company secrets safe from their competitors? The list goes on!

This book serves as a valuable tool in a number of ways. The authors encourage companies to develop sound strategies for harvesting business information, they make good arguments for academics to teach intelligence information gathering, they assist readers to find, collect, and put to use various sources of information, and they offer countermeasures necessary to monitor the information gathering efforts of others.

The authors provide a number of good resources and strategies for finding business information. Various online research tools, visiting company Websites, viewing online job listings, buying and analyzing competitor products, telephone inquiries, and even going to public libraries can pay off!

While the gathering of business intelligence information can be carried out strictly for legitimate personal and business reasons, intelligence gathering operations can be abused and misused. Readers are presented with all the right reasons to conduct their research and to represent their companies in an entirely legal and ethical manner.

The recurring theme of this book is that business information gathering should recognized as a profession rather than merely an occupation or job task assigned to company employees. This field requires professional training, effort, and adequate resources to develop to its full potential. This book is must reading for any person and company involved in the gathering of business information - or who should be and are not presently doing so!

One of the appealing features of Millennium Intelligence is that much of it is written by real-life practitioners -- the folks out there in the trenches designing CI departments, developing information-gathering strategies, and grappling with issues of ethics, budgets and the ambiguities of the law. Read this book not only to pick up tips on gathering information on your competitors, but also to understand how a CI department should be designed and managed, and how to implement a knowledge management function within an organization.

This is one of the best books I've read on the subject. Everyone who is involved in any type of business research or competitor research can benefit from this book. It even includes detailed descriptions of some of the best business information resources available, on- and offline.

This book is one of a number that came out in the last couple of years that purport to provide the reader with a view of the present and future of CI. This one's title gives away its origins as a Y2K written text. Like a number of other recent CI offerings that I've read (my mind comes to Prescott's & SCIP's "Proven strategies" and Fleisher & Blenkorn's book "CI Frontiers"), this is an edited collection, with some chapters offering more value and insight than others.

I particularly liked the chapters by Hohhof on IT as well as the one by Nolan & Quinn on CI and security. Both of these tackled tough subjects in a compact space of one chapter and did so with flair and ingenuity. There were a couple of chapters I thought were far less valuable, particularly the opening and closing chapters by the editor, and the piece on ethics which was basically a culling together of material I know I have previously seen published somewhere by SCIP in either its magazine or review texts. The opening chapter was a basic rehash of items that have been covered thoroughly elsewhere and essentially adds little to any new understanding of the field. The last chapter had much promise in that it ostensibly provided something badly needed in this field, that being case studies. Unfortunately, these "case studies" were little more than short blurbs about incidents that looked like they were drawn out of the daily newspaper. They didn't help me understand how CI (or any other) practices made a difference in these situations, and considering their length, left me with far more questions and concerns than answers. I would hope that the editor would try and provide more in-depth studies in future volumes should he choose to write one because they truly are needed and this effort left much to be desired.

Although he doesn't state this in the preface, my guess is that the editor Miller likely put this effort together to teach introductory post-secondary courses in the subject area. As such, he has to put together 12-13 chapters to cover each week of the subject, necessarily giving enough information on each to stimulate discussion but not enough to give the depth of coverage offered in other books (see my reviews of Ashton & Klavan's STI book, Fleisher & Blenkorn or Fahey's Competitors for books with greater depth than this one) or the breadth of coverage offered in the Prescott & SCIP's "proven strategies" offering.

All in all, this is a cute effort that comes up short against some of the other books currently available in the field. Fortunately, I bought the paperback and thought it was just worth the over [money] I had to pay in my home currency. Had it been done only in hard cover, I would likely have preferred to have bought one of the many used copies at more reasonable prices available at Amazon.

Whether your in the business, have a background in intelligence, or new to the subject, this book provides a pretty good overview on the subject and is a good bridge between "intelligence" (of the secret type) and "competitive intelligence" (of the business world type). This book would not be suitable for an indepth, "how-to" on competitive intelligence. If you really know basics or have extensive knowledge in competive intelligence (and you don't need a good list of references on the subject), than I wouldn't purchase this book. If you have a good background in intelligence and want to be introduced to competitive intelligence and plan to read more, than this is definitely worth $20 bucks.

Gives a very good introduction to the critical role of Intelligence in today's World. Especially having multiple BI's experts giving their take on BI, this book covers very good BI Models such as Porter's Five Forces, SWOT Analysis, Benchmarking, Gap Analysis, Growth-Share Matrix, etc. There is also a fairly good section on the relation (symbiotic onbe) between Knowledge Management and BI. Good book for those keen to learn and know more about BI. Steven Lim (RSTN)

This is an interesting book that covers a lot of territory in the CI area. Several of the pieces are particularly good - I liked the ones by Kassler and Sandman in particular since they easily dealt with difficult topics.

I'm not sure how best to describe the book in terms of its ideal reader but I would guess that most people relatively new to the CI field would find it of some value. More experienced consultants would likely find it too elementary to suit their needs. It is also not a 'how to' book but is rather descriptive - not a problem but also not designed for practitioners.

The basics of understanding competitive intelligence in the digital age are revealed in a guide which covers the key issues in competitive intelligence; from accounting models and the technology marketplace to resources for intelligence. Millennium Intelligence provides a basic overview of business intelligence and its management for business managers.