EDITORIAL NOTE VOL 2, NO 1 (2012)

Abstract

JISIB here presents six new articles. As in the first issue these contributions come from scholars all over the world; from Africa, North America, Asia and Europe. We are very pleased about the diversity of these contributions, also with the fact that we have a good number of female authors. The subject they all have in common is problems related to how private organizations work with information to gain a competitive advantage. More precisely they are occupied with a particular kind of information, the need-to-know, or intelligence. Some of the articles are, as before, more technical, others more qualitative. They are all focused on management practices, that is, solving real life problems. As more technology is being implemented in our corporations, the ability to understand and use new applications distinguishes the skilled from the unskilled, be it in the IT department, the marketing department, in accounting and finance or in human resource management department, where most of those working with intelligence tasks are found.For the first time the journal has opened an opinion section, allowing for contribution which does not fit the format of empirical studies, but offer critical perspectives on the subject studied in this journal. We believe these are important contributions. A discipline should always question what it is doing and it must be able to welcome other methodologies, be it from Critical theory, Post modernism or the Historical school.It is with great interest that we have noticed the attention paid to Open Access journals recently, in particular by an editorial in the newspaper the Economist and by the decision at Harvard University to demand that all research from the institution be published in this format. Right now many other universities are thinking about demanding the same thing from their researchers. This will give Open Access journals a great boost in the time to come. We welcome this development.The journal works in symbioses with a number of conferences. It relies heavily on the contributions of scientific papers presented at these conferences, in particular for these first issues. Among these we would in particular like to mention the more scholarly conferences, like VSST, ECIS, ICTICTI and SIIE. In the near future we also hope to receive contributions from INOSA and ECKM. We also receive support from members in the more professional conferences related to Intelligence Studies like ICI and SCIP. We are most grateful to the organizers and contributors at all of these conferences.As always, we would first of all like to thank the authors for this issue.