Open Data for Competitive Intelligence at a Mining Company: a Focus Group Approach

Competitive Intelligence is a process which involves retrieving, analyzing and packaging information to offer a final product that responds to the intelligence needs of a particular decision maker or community of decision makers. Competitive Intelligence Professionals transform raw data and information into intelligence by collecting and organizing information resources. Mining companies have a Mineral Exploration Department in charge of a comprehensive geological research program all over the world focused on the discovery of mineral deposits. This paper presents a proposal for extracting the information and the data sources commonly used by competitive intelligence professionals responsible for analyzing the mining market. Specifically, this paper intends to answer the following research question: What is the information used to analyze external environments, from the mining companies perspective? To achieve this goal and taking the social-technical design into account, we performed a focus group with experienced professionals from a mining company. As a result of this work, we present: 1) a list of generic data sources; 2) a categorized list of common information used to analyze the external environment; and 3) the main difficulties reported by professionals of this area.