The differences between competitive intelligence, business intelligence and national security intelligence : a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

The concept of “intelligence” represents an important subject for researchers, being developed, over time, in many categories, such as business intelligence, competitive intelligence and national security intelligence. Even so, those meanings basically refer to the same capacity of processing data, information, and knowledge, their differences coming from their area of expertise. Given so, national security intelligence is associated with the state institutions, while business intelligence and competitive intelligence are associated with private companies. National security intelligence represents the capacity of the leaders of a country to process the significant data, information and knowledge for the security of that country, from all possible perspectives. For achieving this performance, each country has its own intelligence structures that must collect data and information, analyze and transform them into valuable knowledge for the decision-makers. The methods and means used for conducting the specific activities by these intelligence structures are mainly secret and classified. This paper represents a literature review regarding the possible links and connections between national security intelligence, business intelligence and competitive intelligence, aiming at discovering the possible similarities between these concepts. To achieve this goal, we used the bibliometric analysis conducted with the specialized software VOSViewer. This analysis was focused on the co-occurrence procedure using words and expressions from article title, abstracts and keywords. The databases used for this paper were retrieved from Web of Science core collection, using the following expressions for searching:”business intelligence – competitive intelligence”,”business intelligence - national security” and ”competitive intelligence - national security”. The results showed that there are not any publications that approach the differences between business intelligence, competitive intelligence and national security intelligence.