Environmental Scanning and

Knowledge Management

Abrity Bhattacharya and Pooja Gopakumar

What is environment scanning

Acquisition and use of information about events, trends, and relationships in an organization’s external environment.

Detecting scientific, technical, economic, social, and political trends and events.

The knowledge of which would assist top management in its task of charting the company’s future course of action.

Concentrates on tracking down: Tacit knowledge (personal knowledge and experience) and Explicit knowledge (rule based and codified)

Objectives of environment scanning

Defining the potential threats, opportunities, or changes for the institution implied by those trends and events;

Promoting a future orientation in the thinking of management and staff; and,

Alerting management and staff to trends that are converging, diverging, speeding up, slowing down, or interacting.

How Knowledge Management helps in ES

Tracking down the three categories of information sources: Human resources; Textual resources; and Online resources

Emphasizes an understanding of: Organization and its environments, Information culture in the organization, Information needs of the organization and users,

and Also helps the organization in learning and

unlearning.

Knowledge Management Tools for Environmental Scanning

SWOT analysis. Internal environment of organization. External environment of organization.

Porter’s Five Force Model External environment of industry. Internal environment of industry.

Strategic analysis of a company

SWOT

SWOT Canvas

Internal and external factors of SWOT

KM and SWOT

Five Force Model Canvas

KM and Five Force Model

Macro analysis

The Economy (GNP or GDP, etc.); Government (political climate, taxes, etc); Legal: (environmental protection, copyright and

intellectual property rights, etc.); Technology (efficiency of infrastructure, etc.); Ecology (production processes and customer buying

habits, etc.); Socio-Cultural (demographic factors such as,

population size, age, education, income, etc.); Potential suppliers (labor supply, quality, etc.); Material suppliers (quality, quantity, price, etc.);

and Service providers.

Use of Environmental Scanning

It cautions decision makers on the trends and changing external environment.

Understanding the external forces of change to develop effective responses which secure or improve their position in the future.

Understanding internal environment to determine resources, staff morale and motivation, management and productivity.

Organization can avoid surprises, identify strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities, gain competitive advantage, and plan strategically

Helps knowledge managers in focusing on information needs, information seeking, and information use.

Organizations can track down: The continuously created new knowledge by

capturing tacit knowledge to develop creative insight.

The shared, explicit knowledge by which the organization develops new products and innovations

Levels of scanning

Organizations have to decide which level of scanning is suitable for them: Regular and continuous scanning:

To keep the proper health of the organization in order to prosper economically, socially and grow

Periodic/regular scanning: To assess their standing on knowledge and how it is

used Irregular or ad-hoc scanning:

Only when they notice a problem in knowledge management.