The role of scanning in open intelligence systems

Abstract

Every month, SRI Consulting Business Intelligence (SRIC-BI) professionals assemble more than 100 short abstracts of developments that they perceive to be signals of change, discontinuities, inflection points, outliers, or disruptive developments. The effort is part of a continuous scanning process and Scan program that allows SRIC-BI to gauge the ongoing turbulent confluence of culture, commerce, and technology that defines today's business environment. For more than 25 years, scanning has played an essential role in SRIC-BI's and SRI International's foresight capabilities by providing a systematic means for surveying the broad external environment for change vectors. Traditional monitoring processes in most organizations are largely arbitrary, depending on what concerned individuals or leaders in the organization are reading, thinking about, and sharing informally with each other. But in today's world, arbitrary is insufficient. No foresight function can operate with confidence without a disciplined process for spotting new patterns of change and bringing those issues into the organization for early consideration and action. This article describes the scanning process as SRIC-BI practices it, the importance of open intelligence systems, what benefits the scanning process can provide to organizations, and what problems organizations typically run into when setting up scanning systems.