Competitive Intelligence is gathering, analyzing and plotting information about competitors, products and customers. These methods are used to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of competitors. Competitive Intelligence is an ethical and legal business practice. In the Czech Republic a new project called Portál CI (www.portalci.cz) has been launched at Masaryk University. It serves as a platform for competitive intelligence professional and students. It provides access to a number of expert articles, methods, instructions and interviews.

Every age brings opportunities and threats, only ones who can match these challenges are successful. Tools for Competitive Intelligence (CI) help them to identify threats and opportunities, understand their nature and use it for their own benefit.

The economic crisis more or less affects all world economies. Sooner or later, it will hit most businesses. Some of them will not manage this situation and will close the business, others with sill survive with larger or smaller losses. On the other hand, some companies will use the crisis to consolidate their position on the market and many new businesses will start, because the crisis is an opportunity to come up with new ideas.

The right information at the right time is the key to business success. In times of crisis, it is doubly true. Professional tools for CI help to effectively process the information inside and outside the company. Tools for CI enable finding individual pieces of information giving them into the context and using them to obtain the competitive advantage. Company than can choose the right strategy for the prevention of threats and seek and exploit new opportunities. CI tools are used mainly in the sales protection (for the verification and monitoring of companies and individuals) and fort the protection of corporate assets and intellectual property (risk assessment and fraud detection). CI tools allow to increase productivity through fast access to information and also to identify new opportunities and to gain competitive advantage using tools for mapping the market.

Some retrospective views on the name of our information profession are considered from the viewpoint of differencies between the French, Soviet-Russian, and English terminology. Informatics („informatika“ in Czech) from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s in contrast to l’informatique used now for computer science in continental Europe. Several usable terms for non-library information professions are discussed.

The master thesis is devoted to various types of information services and an aspect of “added value” within these services. The author maps added value in information services and tries to find a basis for achieving added value in both commercial and public sphere and in context of information systems. Based on a research carried out by the author, current situation in the Czech Republic is described. Furthermore, the thesis describes some particular examples of value-added information services and their practical use, characterizes information processing software tools and outlines trends in value added information services area. (The abstract refers to the original master thesis text.)