Investigating the use of business, competitive and marketing intelligence as management tools in the mining industry

The main objective of this research study is to investigate the extent to which business intelligence, competitive intelligence and marketing intelligence are used within the mining industry. Business intelligence, competitive intelligence and marketing intelligence are the management tools used to mine information to produce up-to-date intelligence and knowledge for operative and strategic decision making. A structured questionnaire is used for the study. A total of 300 mines are randomly selected from a research population of mining organizations in South Africa, Africa and globally. The respondents are all part of senior management. A response rate of 64% is achieved. The results indicat that more than half of the respondents do not have real-time intelligence and proper data mining tools to identify patterns and relationships within a data warehouse. Although a large proportion agrees that their organizations have systematic ways of gathering these different types of intelligence and use them for strategic decision making, there is a significant proportion that did not have any systems. Statistically and practically significant positive relationships with a large effect are found among the dimensions of business intelligence, marketing intelligence, competitive intelligence and perceived business performance.