Chapter 1

Abstract

The mobile telecom sector continues to make headlines all over the world. The press is extensively covering the sector with batteries of experts trying to make sense of the transformation it is undergoing. Incumbent or dominant operators within the most competitive markets are concentrating their efforts on their more direct competitors and are monitoring underlying fundamental competitive, technological and regulatory trends. Regardless of the approach to building competitive intelligence, a study by Deloitte Consulting/The futures Group revealed that 76 percent of companies recognize that they need more information and better Competitive Intelligence (CI) [1]. Traditional forms of business analysis, financial forecasting, budget and variance analyses, cost-benefit studies, are necessary metrics to evaluate company performance, but they are not fully adequate to guide companies strategically, especially in the fast moving telecom world: those companies with competitive advantages can survive fierce global competition. This advantage is based on the knowledge of competitive environment (consisting in technology, customers, suppliers, competitors). We introduce here the steps we faced to build our marketing intelligence system to acquire this knowledge from worldwide available open sources, utilizing text mining technology. This system is based on a competitive intelligence process, where the information is transformed into intelligence and, moreover, into actionable intelligence.