Strategic Decisions and Intelligent Tools

The success of the strategy formulation process is strictly contingent on the reliability and exhaustiveness of the information a strategist relies on. This paper investigates the Internet as a potential resource of the strategically important information and software intelligent agents as a tool for information retrieval. Though the potential usefulness of the Internet is recognized by the business community, a number of problems, namely effective extraction of the relevant information and its adequate interpretation hinder a productive use of the Internet resources in the strategic formulation process. In this paper we demonstrate that software agent-based systems have a potential to tackle these problems. We argue that the Internet contains potentially important information that, in combination with the intelligent tools for its retrieval and management, may provide the strategist with insights into the trends of the external business environment. Our argumentation is supported by experimental studies conducted in a specific industry context with agent-based software systems.