Competitive Intelligence
At
Lexis-Nexis

Submitted to:
Ms. Marian Pio

Submitted by:
Lourdes Andrada
Paolo Garces
Ji Hyeon Kim (Leila)
Victor Kim
Jevan Sugue
Julia Valenzuela
Koko Victory

Table of Contents Background of the Company 3 Background of the Business Intelligence Undertaking: Challenge 5 Background of Business Intelligence Undertaking: Solution 6 Sources 6

Background of the Company

As a market leader with a significant revenue base to protect, Lexis-Nexis certainly understand the value of competitive intelligence.

A source of real time and archival information for 26 years, with 1998 revenues of $1.3 billion, the Lexis-Nexis Group provides customers with highly structured information tools. Our mission is to be the preferred provider of decision support information and services to professionals in legal, business, and government markets. We are comprised of companies operating either within Lexis Publishing (for the legal profession) or the Nexis business unit (serving business, government, and academic markets). Their brands guarantee access to information from authoritative sources, enriched with enhancements such as indexing, linkages, and segmentation. Lexis-Nexis is a large group, global organization with about 8,000 staff in 63 locations, and all 8,000 staff members have access to our CI tools through our internal corporate intranet. Lexis-Nexis have 1.8 million subscribers, excluding the two-thirds of the U.S. undergraduate student population that have full access to Lexis-Nexis via their campus networks. About half their business is online and half off line which are books, CD-ROMs, newsletters, and so on. Lexis-Nexis provide access to some 2.5 billion documents, which is probably equivalent to between 5 and 6 billion pages in Web-size measures, or about 28 terabytes of searchable data online. We store these on a dozen large mainframes.

History

LexisNexis has compiled a long history of delivering on its mission—to enable its customers to spend less time searching for critical information and more time using LexisNexis knowledge management tools to guide critical decisions. Legal professionals have trusted the publishing brands in the LexisNexis Group for more than a century.

For the past three decades, the company’s markets have grown to include business people and other professionals in governments, corporations, academic institutions and other enterprises, all with access to this world of critical information via easy-to-use electronic products.

In 1994, Reed Elsevier acquired the LexisNexis™ service. Begun in Dayton as a contractor to the US Air Force in 1966, its electronic data-search system became the first to retrieve full-text documents. In 1973, the company introduced a legal-research system that revolutionized the way in which legal research and analysis was conducted. The technology propelled the legal profession into a new era.

In 1979, a companion news and business-information service was introduced under the Nexis banner. Michie™, founded in the late 1800s and the sole provider of statutes for 35 U.S. states and territories joined the fold of LexisNexis in 1987.

With the advent of the World Wide Web, LexisNexis moved its information products and services to the new distribution channel, eliminating the need for proprietary software or extensive training. In September 1997, LexisNexis debuted the first Web-based service for U.S. legal professionals, the precursor to LexisNexis™ at www.lexis.com. In 2002, LexisNexis Butterworths Canada and Quicklaw Inc., Canada’s leading online legal research service, agreed to merge. Late in the year, they were formally joined to become LexisNexis Canada, a business unit of North American Legal Markets.

The history of LexisNexis Group represents one of converging companies that today operate within a unified global organization. First to join Reed Elsevier via Reed in 1970 was the legal publishing Butterworths Group, founded in 1818 in the UK. By the 1930s, Butterworths had expanded to other common-law countries, with operations in India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In 1990 Martindale-Hubbell, became part of Reed Elsevier bringing with it a history dating back to the first Martindale law directory published in 1868.

Now a truly international player with established and expanding operations in North America, Europe, South Africa and Asia Pacific, Reed Elsevier in 1998 acquired respected U.S. legal publisher Matthew Bender (founded in 1887) and the remaining interest it did not own in leading citatory Shepard’s Company (founded in 1873). The scene was set for the globalization of the LexisNexis Group that, for the first time in October 2000, united the different parts of Reed Elsevier’s legal-publishing activities. In 2002, the company acquired legal online publishers Quick law Inc. of Canada and MBO Verlag GmbH of Germany.

Services of Lexis-Nexis

* Products
Case law, new, regulation, statutes, et cetera

* Markets
Legal professionals and knowledge workers

* Operations
A high level view of the system from collection and conversion to web deliver

Background of the Business Intelligence Undertaking: Challenge

Since the Lexis-Nexis company is moving to being a full-service provider of decision-support information and services from being an aggregator of information, the company has to move up and take actions for this new trend. The Lexis-Nexis Group is straddling to two markets: legal information and business information and as they could observe through the business information market, customers are changing.

They compete in a portion of this kind of business information market which is valued of around $1.4 billion that is only a small part of a $24-billion corporate information market. Rival companies have their own intranets while others have “extranets” where they get to link with their customers, their suppliers, and their staff in one seamless way which makes the company to be more competitive. And for this kind of marketplace, there are 3 major companies namely Lexis-Nexis themselves, Dow Jones, and Dialog.

With competition, web and new web players are making strategies in the market that would cause for old competitors to team up and review their products that would help in what is the best strategy to sell a product through the use of the internet. Lexis-Nexis has to make actions to know what their competitors are doing, who are the players in the market, and their impact to their business.

Due to the U.S legal information market, 2 major companies stayed in the industry which is Lexis-Nexis and Thomson/West Group from 7 major companies and this kind of market makes $3.5 billion per year and is growing at about 5% to 6% every year.

Lexis-Nexis is also buying companies through auctions which make them have to do something to win the bid. They have to be strategic about their financial capabilities and have the correct assessments to be able to acquire the company being sold.

Since Lexis-Nexis has over 8,000 employees and the challenge of the employees being informative of what the business is facing has to be resolved to be competitive in the market. The biggest concern about competitive intelligence according to their CEO and president, Hans Gieskes, is the sharing of certain information. Programs and reports have to be done to entice the employees and to get information from them to be efficient and effective.

Background of Business Intelligence Undertaking: Solution The Lexis-Nexis company made a website called the Nexis Intranet that can access information on their competitors and what’s happening to the marketplace, it is accessible to all employees within the company. They can also select any competitor and access data about them, or by selecting a product or by area with the list of competitors and the data is updated frequently.

They also developed a tool that is accessible by customers, they call it the Smart Tools. The customers can apply on Smart Tools to link in all of their staff to particular paths or databases. It also provide daily news on all of their competitors. And users have no excuse for not knowing what’s going on in the market, because it is available day and night.

Lastly, another tool that they have been using internally are now open for customers, called the Company Dossier. It is like an official website of Lexis-Nexis, where customers could find out their location, number of staff, a snapshot of the company, financials, and so on. It can also give updates, on that particular company. The customers can also collect information by region, by topic, or by publication.

The Company Dossier also provides update on a firm’s legal situation. It can also tell what litigation a company is currently compromised with and what litigation they’ve been compromised with over the last five years. It also list all the patents, trademarks and copyrights owned by the company. And if a new patent has been filed, it will be updated automatically on their system on the same day.

Analysis of the Case

The case study of Lexis-Nexis showed many ways of implementing Competitive Intelligence in their business. Because of the usage of this of Information Technology, the case showed variables to be considered in order to implement Competitive Intelligence in the business that would make it effective. With these variables, it helped the company to stay on the competition despite the many new and old players in the market place.

First variable that was present in the case was the integrity of the system. The system should be thoroughly filtered to avoid data redundancy and to provide accurate C.I.

Second is the company needs to provide information on how well their company performs. This will help to attract more customers and will also create your brand which could also be the company’s competitive advantage. Next is the company might want to consider doing the business intelligence itself since the data are coming from then. This will give more useful information that their clients can utilize.
Last is the company might want to give seminars and training to employees to further polish their CI.

Conclusion

The case presented a well implementation of Competitive Intelligence in Lexis-Nexis. It illustrated good techniques of how to use information technology in this kind of area. It showed how and what is the advantage of information technology and data mining in overcoming competitors. It showed a good use of business intelligence and its relationship with competitive intelligence.

Overall, the case showed how gathering more information can be used to gain competitive intelligence advantage and use them to improve the system for the users. Another is updating of system to avoid problems like system crash, information redundancy, and mislead data. They also consider strengthening the business intelligence to have a wider range of market.

They could provide information the end-user only needs, and not the whole general information to avoid privacy to other users. They also do welcoming new technologies and updating information to cope or gain advantage to other competitors. They also allowed the company to have both intranet and extranet and pushing the advertising of products through the use of the internet.
Sources

(). Company History. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.lexisnexis.com/presscenter/mediakit/history.asp. [Last Accessed 21 January 2014].