As a lone CI professional, you may only have time to take on few mandates if you have to complete them within a certain time frame. Mandates may be vary from merely analyzing information to searching, organizing and analyzing it. To eliminate the great amount of time that may be involved in finding and sorting, professionals have turned to various vendors to purchase information for their competitive intelligence needs. As a result, professionals can focus on the analysis portion of their tasks. 

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As with any other goods or services, there is a right way to go about shopping for information when you are the sole purchaser of the data for decision-making. Going about it the wrong way can lead you straight to the upper management office with a series of tough questions to answer. This article will assist you in staying out of the hot seat. It will discuss the following aspects important when buying information in a pinch. 

Stay within your budget 
Avoid impulse purchases 
Format : electronic vs. paper 
Storage concerns 
Technical intelligence vs. General intelligence 
Finding analysis friendly data 

In addition, the article will supply you with various outlets to purchase information online.

It is a pretty simple concept in theory; however, it is a very hard thing to practice in reality. Spending the company's money on a couple of documents can be the easiest thing to do, but then again, you can just as easily be swept away by other reports that seem to offer more information than what you originally set out to find. The funds provided to you by management should determine your budget. To have some idea of how much reports cost, visit the countless places on the Web that sell reports. The prices are clearly indicated online and a brief outline of the reports is provided. The newly revamped Northern Light tool does an excellent job of furnishing you with information to make budgetary decisions. In their "Special Collection," Northern Light provides : 

• Price of each report that is available 
• Document Size (in pages) 
• Date of report / document 
• Source of the information 
• Summary of the report 

Once you have gathered the prices and outlines, record them on a spreadsheet to make it easier for top management to evaluate the different options. If you are fortunate, top management may notice that with an increased budget, they would be able to purchase additional information that could be useful for other departments in the company.

For individuals who are new to purchasing information online, it can be very easy to get distracted by the overwhelming amount of information that is available for sale, just like a kid in a candy store. Most often, individuals feel the need to buy a variety of reports on the same subject for future projects. Buying information for future use can lead to "impulse purchasing" and will cause you to overspend. As a result, budgets will not be respected. To avoid "impulse purchasing" : 

• Know exactly what you are looking for in the desired report 
• If you spot a piece of data that would be handy in the future, make note of it and send it to top management for their consideration 
• Read the summaries provided to know what you are getting before buying. If the first report does not have all the data you are seeking, look elsewhere. Do not spend money on another report hoping that you can piece together the data. You might run the risk of gleaning conflicting data 
• Avoid browsing through a directory of titles of reports 

MarketResearch.com has the necessary tools to help you pinpoint information without fishing through numerous documents. The search engine allows you find relevant pieces of data by using precise keywords, and the ability to refine your search-based geographical location.

If you believe that we are living in a paperless society, you may be prompted to buy a report in an electronic format. Having the report in a .pdf format will assist in sharing the information in-house and provides an easy format to extract pieces of data. For those individuals who need to have the physical report in their hands, there is often a reader-friendly document; however, there are some drawbacks, consider: 

• The risk of losing the document 
• The risk of the document landing in the wrong hands 
• Delays of the documents getting to your desk 

Some vendors charge extra to deliver reports in a specified format. Before you buy, make sure that the format you select is best for you in the long run.

Ordering information from Frost and Sullivan affords you the luxury of receiving reports on paper or Electronic Data Format. Beware that if you order multiple copies of a report, you will be charged for each additional copy.

Before you complete the transaction to purchase the information that is required, consider where the information is going to be stored. Documents in an electronic format can sit on your local drive where you are the only person with access to them or they can be put on the corporate intranet. Corporate intranets provide the ability to share the documents with others and become part of your files for future reference. With this in mind, find out the size of the document so you can secure enough space on your drive or intranet to place the information for easy access. For original hard copies, having a filing system whose in-and-out policies are understood by everyone should be implemented. 

Dialog offers their Outsmart Reports via the Web and can be streamed into corporate intranets. The Outsmart Reports provides detailed information to be used for company profiles.

When buying a report, be sure that you can understand the content. Industry-specific reports contain jargon that only experts in their respective fields can understand might not be the right data to fit your needs. The summaries provided with each report on sale by familiar vendors should provide you with a good idea of whether or not the document is loaded with technical terms that could lead to confusion - and to analysis of the data that may be incorrect and result in the execution of wrong strategies. 

Within each category, MindBranch has fairly extensive collection of abstracts for each of the reports that they offer. The abstracts contain the same technical terms as in the full-length document.

To bring additional value to any piece of purchased data, analysis is a must. Using the table of contents that some vendors allow you to see before spending your money, you should know if the report will have enough material to allow you to interpret the data. Reports with tables and charts will furnish you with numerical data to plug in different analytical models. Reports with information in plain raw text format will complicate tasks by making you plough through pages of text looking for something relevant to extract out for your company. 

The summaries at Northern Light gives you the chance to glimpse at the data that you will be working with if you buy the report. They clearly identify if the reports contain surveys, articles, or general information waiting to be analyzed.

When you cannot find information online, a simple alternative is to buy the data. In order to get the most out of the data that you are intending to buy online, there are a number of key decision factors that should be kept in mind. The key decision factors discussed in this article were intended to help you avoid acquiring information that will be: 

• Expensive for your company 
• Not needed at the present time 
• Held in the hands of a few people 
• Impossible to interpret for strategic planning purposes

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