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Business moves fast. Product cycles are measured in months, not years. Partners become rivals quicker than you can say "breach of contract." So how can you possibly hope to keep up with your competitors if you can't keep an eye on them?

That's why competitive intelligence is so important. Forget James Bond. And forget the occasional racy headlines about industrial espionage. We're talking about new approaches to good old-fashioned business dish: a heads-up on a new product, information on a rival's cost structure, a read on an ally's changing strategy.

This kind of information gets exchanged all the time, of course. Engineers swap gossip at trade shows; rival salespeople compare notes at a restaurant. Thanks to the Internet, though, you can acquire more information faster than ever. The Net offers a remarkably wide variety of sources: content-rich Web sites, fast-as-lightning news services, online job postings, brutally honest discussion groups.

We've convened a panel of experts to teach you the new rules of competitive intelligence. Two top consultants (Leonard Fuld and Tracey Scott) and two in-the-trenches researchers (Marc Friedman and Edee Edwards) discuss their secrets for tracking companies and trends. (Their bios appear on page 270.) We also provide do-it-yourself tools, including the most reliable Net-based sources. So take our advice on business intelligence - and get smart.

The Net Changes Everything

Leonard Fuld: The Internet has dramatically accelerated the speed with which anyone can track down useful material, or find other people who might have useful information. Before the Net, locating someone who used to work at a company - always a good source of information - was a huge chore. Today people post their resumes on the Web; they participate in discussion groups and say where they work. It's a no-brainer.

Recently we were asked to determine the size, strength, and technical capabilities of a privately held company. It was hard to get detailed information. Then one of our analysts used Deja News http://www.dejanews.com , a search engine that tracks online discussion groups. The company we were researching had posted 14 job openings to one Usenet newsgroup. That posting was like a road map to its development strategy. You couldn't find that sort of thing five years ago.

Marc Friedman: The Net isn't my only source of information, but it's a major one. It's where I start. One site I like to visit is CorpTech http://www.corptech.com , which provides information on 45,000 high-tech companies and more than 170,000 executives.

Sometimes I'm really amazed at what searching the Net can turn up. One of our product lines consists of antennae for air-traffic-control systems. I got a call from our people in Canada, who needed a country-by-country breakdown of upgrade plans for various airports. I knew nothing about air-traffic control at the time. So I got on the Net. I found a site for the International Civil Aviation Organization, which had lots of great data. I also found several research companies that had done reports.

Edee Edwards: The Net can also waste time. I got a call from someone - I swear this is true - who wanted to know the time in Australia. He'd been searching the Net and couldn't find it. Of course, all he had to do was open a phone book or an almanac and look at a time-zone map! That sort of thing happens a lot more often than you might think.