Scanning Multimedia Business Environments

Abstract

The term environmental scanning (ES) refers to the way in which managers study their relevant business environment. More precisely, we define ES as both looking for and looking at information available in the business environment. These activities embrace all domains of gathering facts from external sources like competitive intelligence (CI) and market research, but take a more holistic, integrative perspective by considering consumers, competitors, and the technological developments in same industry and different industries as well (Scholz & Wagner, 2006). Choo, Detlor, and Turnbull (2001) give an overview of ES and empirical findings supporting the importance of ES activities in business organizations. ES helps managers foresee favorable as well as unfavorable influences and initiate strategies that enable their organizations to adapt to their business environments. This article: • outlines three perspectives on the challenges for environmental scanning arising from information dissemination by multimedia, • discusses opportunities for ES on the World Wide Web (WWW), and • exemplarily describes two software solutions for ES in multimedia. The remainder of the article is organized as follows: the next section discusses challenges for ES arising from the increase of multimedia technologies in the business environment. Then, we discuss the impact of the WWW on ES. Subsequently, we present the state of the art in ES practice as well as the supporting software. The article concludes with a brief outline of future challenges in the field of ES.