Resumen
Competitor Analysis Systems (CAS) seems to be entering an era of almost unlimited vistas due to the information age. In fact, nearly every organization is both a CAS predator and CAS prey in today's IT environment. In today's information environment, a logical competitive response to having the firm become a part of the CAS of a rival firm is information security. Of course, firms already expend much effort and funds to protect company information that would give rival firms a competitive advantage. Surprisingly, however, the literature concerned with CAS has not explicitly addressed the issue of information security. At the same time, the information security literature has not explicitly addressed the CAS issue. The purpose of this article is to rectify this situation. The primary focus of this framework is using information security to prevent rival firms from including sensitive information on the firm in their CAS. Recent developments related to information technology have moved CAS to center stage. In particular, the role of computers, publicly available databases, the Internet, and data analysis techniques, like data mining now permit a level of CAS unimaginable even a decade ago. As a result, firms have invested in a variety of CAS-related activities.