There are several good sources available via the Web that have been around for awhile that provide timely, global strategic business intelligence, or what is sometimes called “Open Source Intelligence” For instance, there’s BBC Monitoring, Dialog’s World News Connection; the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Political Risk Services.

More recently, Silobreaker (which I review in detail in the forthcoming July 2006 Information Advisor) launched its own very interesting open source intelligence product for finding global business information on people, entities, and countries.

There’s also the the DNI Open Source Center which is a newly launched separate CIA agency that makes available the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) bulletins. Those bulletins were once available to anyone to read, but now have been restricted to those who work in government, are a government contractor, or have some government connection.

But I recently came across what seems to be a very good FREE source of open source intelligence, available to anyone. Its called ISRIA and it is published out of Paris. Although there is a subscription fee, the headlines and short excerpts of dozens of stories are available absolutely free. That’s a good find these days, and I’d recommend business researchers to check it out and add it to their toolkit.