Exploratory Competitive Intelligence through Task Complexity Analysis

As one of the major resources for competitive intelligence (CI), the Internet not only provides a large amount of public data but also exposes a variety of business relations that may not otherwise be well-known. However, finding such information can be tedious and time-consuming for end-users without proper tools or expertise. In this paper, we examine the nature of CI tasks, classify and decompose them based on task complexity theories, and propose norms for a context-based approach to retrieve CI data. Our study provides a framework to further explore the relationships among CI tasks, interactive search, and context-based search systems design.