The importance and acquisition of information in the light of benchmarking

Benchmarking is a modern method of management that creates opportunity to improve, measure and compare own results with the leader’s results and then to describe its various forms. The author emphasizes the importance of information being a valuable resource of the company and at the same time being the basis for applying the benchmarking method. It is worthwhile noting that not all information that reachesthe organization is useful. Therefore, the need to analyze and evaluate information becomes more and more important. In this work, the methods of obtaining information directly and indirectly have been distinguished. In the last part of the work, the concept of "business intelligence" was explained and various variants of it were listed and explained. The problem of economic espionage and methods that can be used by people who want to obtain data for benchmarking was also outlined. However, it is worth noting that both concepts of business intelligence and economic espionage share a very thin border.