Business Intelligence Using Smart Techniques: Environmental Scanning Using Text Mining and Competitor Analysis Using Scenarios and Manual Simulation - Hardcover

Halliman, Charles

9780967490625: Business Intelligence Using Smart Techniques: Environmental Scanning Using Text Mining and Competitor Analysis Using Scenarios and Manual Simulation

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0967490626 ISBN 13: 9780967490625

Publisher: Information Uncover, 2001

This specific ISBN edition is currently not available.

Business intelligence, text mining, environmental scanning, scenario planning, competitor analysis, and actionable information are terms often heard today in the business world. Pulling these terms together in a way that enables the terms to take on lucid strategic meaning can be extremely important to today's business planner. Business Intelligence Using Smart Techniques is a book about using text mining to perform environmental scanning, and using scenarios and simulation to perform competitor analysis. This book focuses on methods that identify and extract important company-external business information. This book addresses the conversion of the business information into business intelligence. And this book addresses the use of business intelligence to improve a company's competitive position by showing how potentially profitable actions can be taken based on the intelligence.

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About the Author

Charles Halliman is a business intelligence consultant. With over twenty-five combined years as a consultant, a NASA engineer using scenario and simulation methods, and a manager at one of the Fortune 500 companies, Mr. Halliman has used his knowledge and experience to help other companies improve their tactical and strategic positions. His book can help you improve your company s business position by showing you how to convert business information into business intelligence. His book should become part of your library.

From the Back Cover

"Charles Halliman has written an interesting book that is certainly of value to the business community. A strong point is the book's practical orientation towards the solution of real business problems. It is clear that Halliman has experience in this area. A related strong point is the way Halliman embeds text mining in a kind of ontology for competitor and environmental analysis." ---Pieter Adriaans Co-author of Data Mining, Research Director of Syllogic, and Professor of Learning and Adaptive Systems at the University of Amsterdam

"This book establishes a novel and important connection between text mining, environmental scanning, and the use of scenarios and simulation. While the book centers on environmental scanning and scenario development, it introduces text mining as a new approach to environmental scanning. And in this book, Halliman shows that he is cognizant of some of the main thrusts in strategic theory, drawing from such work as Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy." ---William Acar, Ph.D. Co-author of Scenario-Driven Planning and Associate Professor of Management Systems at the Graduate School of Management, Kent State University

From the Inside Flap

Business intelligence is becoming more important to more and more companies. And text mining methods can be quite useful to any company engaged in obtaining business intelligence. Business Intelligence Using Smart Techniques presents text mining as a way to perform environmental scanning. This book illustrates the use of text mining for obtaining information about environmental forces.

These forces are regulatory forces, litigation forces, political forces, governmental forces, technology forces, collaborative forces, marketing forces, foreign forces, management forces, and competitor forces. Knowledge of events associated with environmental forces usually comes from company-external sources. By analyzing text from these sources, this book shows you how to gain environmental force-related knowledge.

Many books on business intelligence don’t really talk a lot about the specifics of company-external business information analysis techniques. But this book does. It uses scenario and simulation techniques as one of its analysis methods. And the book introduces a manual simulation method that is quick and useful.

This book puts the reader inside a fictional company as a strategic planner, and it takes the reader through the process of mining and analyzing text from company-external sources. Halliman discusses the identification and extraction of business concepts. He analyzes the concepts for threats and opportunities. And he outlines strategies for dealing with the isolated threats and opportunities.

This book highlights two categories of business “concepts.” The first category deals with environmental forces that can affect a company. Halliman analyzes a ten-year period, using visualization charts and “extracted concepts” analysis.

The second category of business “concepts” deals with competitor activities. Halliman identifies and analyzes twenty competitors and their activities. The analysis of the environmental forces, the competitors, and their activities is done using analysis forms. These forms expedite the analysis process.

The user does not have to figure out what questions to ask and then try to answer them. The forms indicate the kind of information the reader should have or try to get. The forms then take the reader through the analysis process.

Environmental scanning and competitor analysis should be at the heart of any company’s business analysis tools. This book explores environmental scanning and business analysis related ideas.

If the ideas set forth in this book are applied, a company can improve its strategic position.

Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From the introduction: We divide the environment into forces and create distributions and trends for these forces. We convert the distributions, trends, and underlying business information concepts into threats and opportunities. We extract relevant information concepts from news sources that represent the key opinions, actions, and expectations of influential industry-related environmental players. We create graphic pictures (or charts) of industry-related U.S. environmental forces, including competitor activities. We then analyze the charts and the extracted concepts to determine threats and opportunities.

This book puts the reader inside a fictional company as a strategic analyst. The reader gets an opportunity to see how business information can be "mined" and analyzed. Text mining as a method for scanning business text is discussed, and scenario and simulation analysis as a technique for analyzing a competitor's activities is explained. The reader gets a good feel for environmental scanning, text mining, scenario and simulation analysis, and competitor analysis.

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