Globalization has come to be seen as a profitable and successful strategy that has arrived for all types of companies, not just the vast multinationals that have been much criticized for their use and abuse of corporate global reach and power. The challenge to business information professionals who are required to research a competitor company with global interests should not be underestimated. This article looks at the issues involved in conducting this research in a definitive way.

A decade ago, globalization was a term mainly used to describe the activities of investment banks integrating their securities trading activities across financial centres and time zones around the world. Very few industrial companies could then be said to be truly global in participation across broad or niche markets. Globalization is not a new concept, but in today's terms it represents a radical change in international business.

Multinational companies have operated a very specific type of international activity since the end of WWII in 1945, developing organically and typically controlling foreign operations from a strong central base in the home country. The research requirements for multinational expansion overseas were achieved on the ground by a range of company executives, by what is understood today to be primary research. The very terms used; "foreign" and "overseas" were highly representative of the nature and attitude of the international business conducted by these firms. These rather old-fashioned terms have been replaced by "cross border" and "global" in the vocabulary of companies diversifying internationally.

One other significant difference is evident. Global reach today often is tied in with assessing and achieving merger and acquisition opportunities alongside the assessment of competitors. Companies can no longer afford the luxury of developing international business slowly and organically and prefer to buy successful companies in countries as they expand.

As companies move into cross border opportunities involved in globalization, the need to conduct definitive business research, the secondary research, particularly competitive intelligence, in a global context becomes essential for further success. This process can be complex and time consuming and is certainly ongoing. Many companies who are confident and familiar with the methods and practices of competitive intelligence in their domestic or local regional markets may find the requirement to extend their research into the global arena very difficult to accomplish in any structured way. Understanding the and applying data that can now be collected from unfamiliar, numerous and disparate pan regional and country published sources is very complex.

Effective global company research can be done best by the systematic and knowledgeable collection and interpretation of information from the multiple sources using all the skills and expertise of the special librarian. The internet has made many published sources more accessible, but using the internet as the main access point particularly requires this disciplined and structured approach

An approach is suggested covering four main themes that can be used as a whole in ongoing complex cross border competitive intelligence projects. It is also possible to take elements of the themes to research individual companies on a superficial or detailed basis. What is important is the understanding and ability to research and investigate any possibilities where unusual data might be located.

The themes are:
I. Structuring the Global Research
Organizing the global company research/project in a systematic way in four main areas:

1. company identification; the ongoing identification of competitors from the development of the global market, especially the awareness of new and unexpected competition. All international competitive intelligence needs to have a clear cut method of company identification.

2. detailed individual company research to a definitive standard with the inclusion of new research topics and aspects of competitor activity, especially tracking the global strategy of the company

4. positioning global company research from the home company viewpoint; global strategy will vary depending on the location of the holding company and needs to be assessed.

5. defining the scale of the research by establishing the actual global structure and ownership of the competitor company and its subsidiaries; an area that may take some time and effort to establish; this is also an area where assuming that the company website is accurate and complete on all aspects of international activities can be very misleading.

II. The Concept of the Global Company
The importance of the overall global view in this type of company research; an appreciation of main drivers of cross border business and the ability to research the broad picture as it affects the global competitor.

In developing competitive intelligence services there is a need to understand and integrate these macro level factors into any system as they may provide good perspective into the understanding of the global structure of any group of companies in a global market or the individual competitor company. Understanding the means used to achieve global success should be the first aspects of data collected on the competitor and should be regularly monitored. The mechanics will include collecting data on the main changes that have dominated globalization over the last ten years:

• The collapse of Communism and the move from command to market driven economies at both country and regional level along with the privatization of state owned enterprises. Competitor companies emerging from countries where privatization programmes have been extensive need to be tracked, as well as the activities of known conventional competitors in acquiring interests from privatization that may affect their competitive position in a country or region.
• The move away from organic growth to growth by mergers and acquisitions require expertise in tracking deals, and other partnerships as well as rumoured alliances. An appreciation of the levels of concentrations or monopoly legally allowed in regions and countries is also important.
• The formation of major regional economic and trading groups and the development of common corporate trading legislation and practices within these groups and how this affects the competitor activities in these regions.

III. Sourcing Global Company
Competitive Intelligence
The actual sources required to conduct global competitive intelligence are identification, access, searching, and dissemination

• Scope of the "global" sources sold commercially; assessment of the true global content of the company information services
• Pan-regional searching; identifying and attributing data to official and commercial sources
• Country level searching with local regional level sources; when to use these sources to give added depth to research.
• Integrating results from various formats and source types
• Identifying gaps and partial results; knowing where no published data will be available on certain topics in certain regions or countries
• Balancing source types in a cost and time effective system

IV. Conducting Detailed Global
Research into Companies
Collecting and assessing the data and relevance to the particular global competitors being researched using themes one through three.

• Identifying companies operating in broad or narrow industrial sectors globally; problems and practicalities of creating accurate selections
• Topics that need to be researched on each company chosen from a set of possible searches; which aspects need to be regularly monitored
• Problems of standardization of data taken from many formats, languages and systems, how to use it and present it within the project
• To whatever level global competitive research is done, it is much more complex than pan-regional or single country coverage and should be approached in a much broader context.