BI in ex-Yugoslavia

[Roman V. Romachev]

Do you know the good specialist (or prof.companies) of business intelligence (DD, Background checking, Compliance... ) in the former Yugoslavia (Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina)?

[Evgeny Yushchuk]

Mislav Jurisic is from Croatia. We met at SCIP conference few years ago.

[Mislav Jurisic]

Roman, thanks for your question.

I will give here some general comments and I hope to trigger others to join the discussion. I'll try not to mention any names as not to offend anyone or forget about anyone. .Also I don't know everything and hopefuly we'll get people in to join the forum who will say more about their countries and their activities if they want to. And if you look in past few days some have joined in.

My understanding of BI/CI in ex-yu is following in short (most of it is based on Croatia and Slovenia, but is I think relevant for Serbia as well):
- according to what I know there is no consulting company doing just CI/BI operating locally on all these markets (but again I can be wrong)
- there were some attempts in my country at least from several ex-intel collegues to build up some CI consulting but I'm not aware how successfull this was or they are not willing to talk about this much, some are active
- there are market research agencies (http://hgk.biznet.hr/hgk/tekst.php?a=b&page=tekst&id=607) – link to society of market research agencies in Croatia under chamber of commerce. Most of these would do some CI but they would not promote their activites or they don't call it that way (business research or strategic analysis, etc). Mainly focus on secondary sources but talk to experts as well. They also have an annual conference for market research in south-east Europe every year I think in Belgrade. There is one market research agency from „Central Europe“ claiming to be covering whole region but I don't know how well, I'm sure you heard about them
- also there are PR agencies who do some CI and most of them don't talk loud about it
link to society for public relations of Croatia with list of companies http://www.huoj.hr/Default.aspx?sec=209 , other countires association links could also easily be found , some even have some projects around CI services but trying to stay low
- there are more and more private detective companies and those dealing with security that claim on their pages they do CI but I know little about them
- there are some IT related companies claiming they do CI or tying together their BI software (business warehousing etc.) with CI but in unclear way (purely for promotion purpose is my guess)
- there are couple of academics teaching CI in Croatia, but as well in Slovenia and Serbia and I've seen some activities from foreign speakers as well, some books were witten as well in couple of past years in Croatia and Serbia according to my knowledge, I hope that we will be talking about them as well here or in books Group.

Most of these companies/people could be easily found by just googling „competitive intelligence“ with „.hr“, „.si“, „.yu“ or „.sr“ .Other terms used are „business intelligence“ (but there is a lot of DW stuff), recently over here some academics use „kompetitivna inteligencija“ and there are some other used as well (in local languages).

Regarding due dilligence I have in the past work dealt mainly with big consulting groups who do due dilligence (accounting, tax, …) as part of their consulting business. There are many legal consulting companies doing D.D. and companies in my experience usually hire separately financial and legal advisers . CI part they never ask about or it is covered through private connections and there is sometimes an „intermidiary“ who leads the whole process from buyer side and he/she would be covering some part of CI/information needs. When we did this in my previous work we would be using sometimes our own sales people to get some critical information.

I hope I didn't confuse you, but gave some insight (CI on CI) which would hopefully help.
I will be trying to involve in the forum all people I know that deal with this topic. It will take some time :)

[Roman V. Romachev]

Dear Mislav, thanks for the info.
I began my search with a professional company providing services, and already up the entire internet, all the domain-zone of the former Yugoslavia, to the great regret, I found only about 10 detective agencies in Serbia and Croatia, and about 20 in Slovenia. Unfortunately most of them I thought low-skilled. Therefore, I would like to find it is business-intelligence agency (rather than PR, or detective agency) in the region to carry out joint projects. I have many colleagues (Russians) are now permanent residents in fear of the former Yugoslavia, but I am interested in the local experts. Of particular interest to me to Montenegro!

[Mislav Jurisic]

I think this is something more to be approached on case by case, since let's say an expert(more specifically a technology expert) in food industry from let's say Croatia would know very well the situation in B&H, or Serbia or Montenegro etc since this was the natural market for all companies from ex-Yu and still most of them are focused there. Again depends on industry. I think relevant would be someone from Serbia as well. One can only guess what would be the interest from Russia in Montenegro.