The Economic Intelligence process : A study according to the point of view of the infomediary and of the information retrieval problem

From a business point of view, the world of information has changed in the last fifteen years. Many companies are now aware of the strategic importance of information. Thus, some years ago, when we talked about information management in business, we were talking implicitly about the documentation chain. Nowadays, many other approaches can be identified as intrinsically linked to information. In this paper, we try to clarify the distinctions which exist between these approaches and the actors. In addition, this study is a conclusion of some investigations realized about Economic Intelligence, particularly on the Lorraine project: DECiLOR™, in which one of our researchers contributed and we have interviewed a lot of the other actors of this project. Firsly, we thus analyse a new information discipline, that of the infomediary. We define it, compare it to the intelligence cycle and to another information discipline, the watcher. Secondly, we study the distinctions which exist between Documentation, Watch and Economic Intelligence, from the information retrieval problem (IRP) approach used. We use this last analysis to complete our first definition of the infomediary