Introduction

As organizations become more familiar with the Internet including the World Wide Web (hereafter, the Web) they begin to see the potential for using these resources to supplement and extend their esixting environmental scanning activities. The amount and variety of information available on the Web is growing dramatically. Those organizations which develop a strategy for identifying and scanning Web sites relevant to their environment will have a competitive advantage. Other organizations without a Web scanning strategy are likely to waste resources "surfing" the vastness of the Web. Although surfing may yield some relevant sites, organizations without a strategy are unlikely to continue to scan those sites on any regular schedule.

The ease with which one can move from site to site on the Web can cause the illusion that the wealth of information available with or without a fee is enormous, contrasted with the associated costs of acquisition. Information managers in modern organizations realize, however, that efforts to identify, acquire, store, retrieve, analyze, report, use, discard, or disseminate data and information involve considerable costs. The vast information resources available on the Web cannot be ignored. The cost of the harvest, however, is high, for the reasons stated and because the data and information available at various Web sites is not formatted in ways which facilitate easy integration with the existing information systems of any particular organization. The identification, retrieval, organization, storage and dissemination of Web sources require careful planning and systematic management.

Aguilar's (1967) seminal book on environmental scanning appeared over 30 years ago. A considerable body of literature on environmental scanning has emerged and continues to evolve today. As organizations seek to integrate the use of the Web into their organizations in productive and efficient ways they can benefit from considering such efforts in the context of environmental scanning theory. While environmental scanning is not the only purpose to which the Web can be put and the Web is not the sole means of performing environmental scanning, organizations can benefit significantly by thinking about each in the context of the other. Many of the lessons learned to date in the environmental scanning realm can be reapplied in this new context of the world of the Web.

The purpose of this paper is to identify considerations for mating Internet and Web-based activities an active part of an organization's overall environmental scanning activities. To this end we discuss the growing potential for the use of the Web for environmental scanning activities, and the need for a systematic approach to Web-based environmental scanning.

The Growing Significance of the World Wide Web

The growth in the number of Web sites available and the number of people exploring the Web in recent months in astounding. Both the number of sites and the number os users are likely to continue to increase dramatically as internet access becomes less costly and as it becomes easier to create Web documents and maintain sites on servers. Software companies are scurrying to make their software products, such as word processing programs and spreadsheets, Web-capable. Initial public offerings of stock in Internet-related firms such as Netscape, a leader in Web browser development, have exceeded expectations and in doing so, made instant millionaires. Educational institutions, business corporations, governmental agencies, and other types of organizations (as well as some individuals) rush to get a presence on the Web with a home page.

To be a "player" on the Web is seen as a mark of competence or possessing an aura of "cutting edge" commitment to being technologically advances over one's competitors. Sales of hardware to offer and access Web services have skyrocketed. Support groups for those addicted to "surfing the Net" or "browsing the Web" have sprung up at various locations throughout the world. Once the realm of defense agencies, military researchers, and an elite scientific community, the Web has become the home for a great variety in the types and quality of its contents. Significant resources of time and money are being directed toward Web-related activities, much of which is expended by organizations struggling to find out what this new phenomenon is and what it means to them as an organization.

As of this writing there is not yet a sizeable body of established literature on the variety of ways organizations may already be using the Web for strategic environmental scanning. It is reasonable to assume that many organizations are exploring how to use the Web to supplement, extend, and/or replace some of their traditional scanning activities.

One may speculate that the advent of the Web has actually increased the need for environmental scanning by elevating "cyberspace" to the status of itself being a significant part of human and organizational environments. Cyberspace can be thought of as the global network of computers interconnected by wires and other means of electronic communication, or as the evolving human culture which the hardware (and software) is facilitating, or as both. Whatever it is, cyberspace expands as the number of Web sites and users increases. In this paper we assume that Cyberspace is a kind of media, rich in content, by which we can gain access to information about an organization's "real" environment, realizing that cyberspace can be thought of as at least a virtual environment itself.

The Need for Systematic Environmental Scanning

Environmental scanning is the process of identifying relevant factors in the organizational environment and acquiring information about those factors, usually for the purpose of decision making. Simon's (1965) description of the three phases of the decision-making process mentions the "intelligence activity" in the first phase of his model -- the process of finding an occasion for making a decision. Schoderbck, Schoderbck, and Kefalas (1990, p.204) point out that all of Simon's phases of the decision-making process are dependent upon the environmental scanning process. In addition to the first phase mentioned above, environmental scanning also supports the phases of finding possible courses of action and choosing among those courses of action.

There are a number of driving factors which make environmental scanning an activity of greater importance or necessity in today's organizations. First is the increased level of dynamism found in the environments of most organizations. The rate and the magnitude of environmental changes seems to be increasing for many organizations and they are driven to ever-increasing levels of environmental scanning activities in an effort to understand, anticipate, or cope with these changes.

Second, the increasing complexity of organizational environments compels them to engage in environmental scanning. Organizations face environments with growing numbers of environmental factors which bear watching. These factors are not only increasing in number, but they are also less homogeneous in many instances, making a "one-scanning-approach-fits-all" strategy no longer viable. The environmental factors may also participate in a greater number of relationships with other environmental factors, more complex relationships with other environmental factors, or both. The attributes of those relationships may be more difficult to understand. Al of these things contribute to the overall complexity of the organizational environment.

Increased competitiveness among organizations also elevates environmental scanning to greater levels of importance. Organizations cannot afford to be "in the dark" with respect to an environmental factor while their competitor is "in the know." A growing emphasis on time-based competitiveness makes timeliness of environmental scanning information paramount. The globalization of the economy takes competitiveness out of the domestic arena and places it in the more uncertain broader realm. Environmental scanning can help extinguish a portion of the uncertainty. As an organization's competitors escalate the stakes or the tenor of competition by developing new means of scanning their environments and strategically aligning themselves to take advantage of opportunities or to avoid threats, the organization may feel compelled to match or exceed the efforts of others in order to remain competitive.

Regardless of why an organization chooses to engage in environmental scanning, the scanning process is an activity which, like any critical activity of the organization, should be managed. Scanning activities range from the highly informal "ad hoc" approaches found in some organizations to the highly formalized and highly structured approaches found in others.

With respect to Web-based environmental scanning, it is important that we make a clear distinction between serendipitous discovery and planned environmental scanning activities. To surf the Web merely in the hopes of some fortunate discovery of vital pieces of information is likely to be wasteful and unproductive. We propose, however, that systematically managed Web-based environmental scanning activities can bring significant benefit to the organization which engages in such activities. This is not to say that serendipitous discovery is to be ignored when it occurs. Rather, we suggest that such strokes of luck be gladly received when they occur within the process of executing a managed Web-based environmental scanning plan.

There are several important ways that organizational resources can be wasted in poorly directed Web activities. The information acquisition channels' bandwidth may be exceeded. The organization's information processing and filtering mechanisms might overload. Even if the acquisition channels remain viable and all of the acquired information were successfully processed and filtered, the bandwidth of the organization's internal information dissemination channels may become overloaded by too much extraneous information and the valuable environmental information may be obscured by the noise.

Any or all of the sources of waste included above may result in the loss of valuable information in a sea of other information which is irrelevant, untimely, or of low quality. A strategic approach to Web-based scanning should reduce the retrieval and processing of low quality information and enhance the potential for obtaining and processing quality information in a timely way.

The Need for a Web Scanning System Model

Fragmentation of the scanning effort is a major pitfall for organizations (Stoffels, 1994, p. 103) and the potential for fragmentation extends to Web scanning activities as a subfunction of the entire organization's scanning activities. We feel that a degree of formalization can benefit an organization considerably, allowing Web scanning activities to be more closely aligned with the overall environmental scanning activities and objectives of the organization. Formalization can also improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Web scanning and the environmental scanning process in general by providing a systematic approach to focusing scanning activities on potentially high-value targets and allocating resources to activities which have a good chance of returning valuable information.

The formalization that is proposed in this paper is not intended to prevent individuals in the organization from learning about the Web through their own informal activities. Our proposed approach simply provides a common context for thinking about making one's scanning activities productive, efficient, and useful to a larger organizational audience. We feel that such an approach is far preferable to random "surfing" of the Web. There is still sufficient room within our model for serendipitous discovery, but use of our model helps to insure that such discoveries are within the realm of organizational relevance.

Directions for Future Research

Further research is needed in a variety of areas related to this work. First, it would be useful to look at the role that Web-based environmental scanning activities are currently playing in today's organizations. Second, research to determine the current level of consumption of organizational resources for Web-based activities should be determined and some assessment of the productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness of those activities should be made. Third, it would be quite beneficial to study existing internet, Web, and other information systems tools to see how may of them support the various model components. Finally, it would be an engaging intellectual challenge of great potential merit to develop a model and a system and to test it in an organization.

References

Aguilar, F.J., Scanning the Business Environment, New York, Macmillan, 1967.

Schoderbek, P.P.,Schoderbek, C.G., and Kefalas, A.G., Management Systems: Conceptual Considerations, 4th edition, Homewood, IL, BPI-Irwin, 1990.

Simon, H.A., The Shape of Automation for Men and Management, New York, Harper Torchbooks, The academy Library, 1965.

Stoffels, J.D., Strategic Issues Management: A Comprehensive Guide to Environmental Scanning, Oxford, OH, The Planning Forum and Pergamon, 1994.