The authors have provided the first ARIST chapter on environmental scanning. Their chapter covers the nature of environmentaaal scainning, organization theory as it relates to organizations and environments, and organizations as information-providing systems. The authors discuss informaiton needs and uses within the contexts of the system-oriented research paradigm, the user-centerd research paradigm, and information-use environments. They look ar managers as users in terms of their managerial roles and interms of their acquisiion and use of information

Environmental Scanning: Acquisition and Use of Information by Managers.

Forty years of the International Journal of Information Management: A bibliometric analysis

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Theorising information use: managers and their work

Due to the ever-increasing quantity of available information, which users have to scan in order to find relevant items, noise has become a major issue in the implementation and use of information retrieval systems. The aim of this study was to design an information retrieval system permitting the “personalization” of search, by taking into account user profile. A pre-orientation system was first developed to give access to a personalized subcorpus. To limit noise in information retrieval systems, the textual material offered to the user is reduced and contains only those sections (units) of the document that interest him and are significant to him (where textual material is used in the sense of document units to be processed by content analysis in order to build descriptions of the documents). In this way, the documents are structured on the basis of utility functions. The selected document units are part of the sub-corpus defined by the pre-orientation system. Next, the profile of each user is characterized by determining competence in a given field and at different levels. Each user is characterized by: • -stable information, related to the person rather than to a particular search. This information provides a general description of the user and his habits, • -variable information, related to a specific search. The priority here is to describe the objective of the search (search may be either exhaustive or non-exhaustive; it may concern specialized or popular publications, etc.). The function of the pre-orientation system is to associate a set of characteristics applying to document units to a given user profile. Search is then applied only to the subset of the selected document units that are relevant to the user and established following his profile. Document units are not characterized on the basis of thematic criteria related to content, but rather on the basis of criteria relating to utility. The objective was to propose a hypothesis on the different parameters determining user profile and document unit characteristics, and to test such a hypothesis using an existing information retrieval system incorporating full-text natural language processing tools.

Improving information retrieval by combining user profile and document segmentation

The present study investigates how chief executive officers in the Canadian telecommunications industry acquire and use information about the external business environment, an information seeking activity known as environmental scanning. Data were collected by a nationwide questionnaire survey and several focused interviews. Of the 113 CEOs in the study population, 67 returned completed questionnaires, thus giving a response rate of 59 percent. Personal interviews were then conducted with eight of the respondents. The chief executives collectively perceive the Technological, Customer, and Competition environmental sectors to have the greatest Perceived Strategic Uncertainty – these sectors were perceived to be the most strategic, variable and complex. For each environmental sector, the Amount of Scanning of the sector is positively correlated with the Perceived Strategic Uncertainty of that sector. Generally, the chief executives use multiple, complementary sources in environmental scanning. Personal sources such as customers and subordinate staff are very important in both scanning and decision making, and they are used more frequently than impersonal sources. Nonetheless, impersonal sources such as publications and reports are also frequently used in scanning. In decision making, environmental information from internal sources is used more frequently than that from external sources. For many of the information sources, the frequency of source use is positively correlated with Perceived Source Accessibility, Perceived Source Quality, and Perceived Environmental Uncertainty. However, among these three variables, it is Perceived Source Quality that accounts for most of the variance of the frequency of source use. This appears to contradict past research and extant theory. We suggest that the turbulence of the external environment, the strategic role of scanning, and the special character of the information use contexts of managers, help to explain why information quality is more important. The chief executives use environmental information frequently in the four decisional roles of Entrepreneur, Resource Allocator, Disturbance Handler, and Negotiator. Furthermore, the executive who scans more is likely to use environmental information more frequently in the Entrepreneur decisional role; while the executive who perceives a higher level of Perceived Environmental Uncertainty is likely to use environmental information more frequently in the Negotiator decisional role.

D. White

Papers

Information use and needs in manufacturing organizations: Organizational factors in information behaviour

Book review: Research methods in information systems