Modeling External Information Needs of Food Business Networks

Awareness of threats and opportunities in the business and competitive environment is crucial for sustainable economic success of every company. It becomes even more important in the food sector where companies are parts of interdependent business networks. Scanning and monitoring the business environment for competitive intelligence has received a substantial push by the emergence of the Internet and the information provided there. Efficiency considerations favor joint, industry-wide market and competition monitoring systems for companies in food networks. Therefore, a crucial prerequisite is modeling the network’s external information needs. Modeling external information needs of agrifood networks is difficult because not all areas of the business environment are equally relevant to all companies, and every company has its own and distinct perspective on it. This chapter presents a guideline for modeling the differentiated external information needs in food networks and their transfer to a monitoring system infrastructure. The guideline consists of two phases: organizing the tasks and activities to perform and results to obtain. The first phase regards the analysis and differentiation of the external information needs in the business network; the second phase deals with the transfer of the differentiated information need to the processes and structure of a supporting software system and includes the design of a categorization scheme and appropriate personalization filters.