Ranking enterprise reputation in the digital age: A survey of traditional methods and the need for more agile approaches

Different data sources and analytical methodologies can be used to establish a ranking of enterprises according to several performance measures including their reputation, financial health, and future growth potential. Such a ranking can be extremely useful for third enterprises interested in creating alliances, outsourcing some activities, or simply contracting services offered by external firms. This paper reviews well-established methodological approaches that have been employed to generate such rankings, which are typically applied on reduced sets of large enterprises. We discuss the need to extend these ranking practices to large sets of small and medium enterprises, which do not usually provide publicly-available data. In consideration of present digital age, we support the following concepts: 1) citation indicators - such as those generated by search engines - can be employed to automate the fast generation of rankings; 2) when properly validated, these 'agile' rankings can be used as proxies for a reputation ranking.