What explains differences in firms' abilities to acquire competitive capabilities? In this paper we propose that embeddedness, in terms of firms' network of bridging ties and linkages to regional institutions, are important sources of variation in firms' acquisition of competitive capabilities. We argue that firm networks rich in bridging ties and firms' participation in regional institutions are critical vehicles for accessing new information, ideas, and opportunities leading to the acquisition of competitive capabilities in geographical clusters. Hypotheses are tested on a stratified random sample of 227 job shop manufacturers located in several regions of the US Midwest using data gathered from a mailed questionnaire. Results from structural equation modeling broadly support the embeddedness hypotheses and suggest a number of novel insights about the link between firms' networks and competitive capabilities.

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

Information workers center on seeking, gathering, and interpreting information in order to provide value-added information as a basis for making decisions and judgments critical to the function of an enterprise. This longitudinal case study investigates changes in perceptions of the information search process of an early career information worker as he becomes more experienced and proficient at his work. Building on Kuhlthau’s earlier research, comparisons of the user’s perceptions of uncertainty, complexity, construction, and sources in information tasks were made over a 5-year period. This is a case study, but it provides insight into issues raised in prior quantitative studies of securities analysts.

Abstract: Environmental scanning is the acquisition and use of information about events, trends, and relationships in an organization's external environment, the knowledge of which would assist management in planning the organization's future course of action. Depending on the organization's beliefs about environmental analyzability and the extent that it intrudes into the environment to understand it, four modes of scanning may be differentiated: undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, enacting, and searching. We analyze each mode of scanning by examining its characteristic information needs, information seeking, and information use behaviors. In addition, we analyze organizational knowing processes by considering the sensemaking, knowledge creating and decision

A good knowledge and understanding of the business environment is a basic premise for strategic management. A system that is able to help managers actively scan the environment will contribute to active executive support. This paper examines the relevance of the intelligent software agent approach in environmental scanning activities and exploits ways that an agent can help in accomplishing scanning tasks. It then describes a prototype system that is currently under development. The system is designed to make use of potential business environment information resource on the World Wide Web to extract useful information for managers. Using pulp and paper industry as a case context, it is showed in this paper how the agent is constructed and how it provides up-to-date industry news and market information to managers. 1.

The market-focused learning organization continues to attract attention in the marketing literature. Two central and interrelated aspects of collective learning are organizational culture and memory. The relationship between culture and performance has been demonstrated both theoretically and empirically. This study investigates the influence of culture and organizational memory development on perceptions of managers ’ decision-making context. Findings suggest that both organizational culture and memory influence marketing managers ’ perceptions of decision-making context. Specifically, managers in externally focused cultures tend to perceive a relatively higher proportion of strategic problems than managers in internally focused cultures, and managers in organic process cultures tend to perceive a relatively higher proportion of unstructured problems than managers in mechanistic cultures. The implications for managerial practice are discussed and avenues for future research outlined. Marketing managers are required to make decisions under difficult circumstances. There are few proscriptions or universal marketing laws to guide them, and a variety of

Business and Information Systems (IS) alignment is a key management issue and has been largely investigated. Yet, little research shows companies how a fit between these "two worlds" can be achieved. The assumption of this paper is that making explicit the business model can contribute to improving the business/IT alignment. Moreover information systems supporting environmental scanning, strategic or competitive intelligence, and technology assessment, which are of prime importance for organizations, are much less investigated. This paper also aims at deriving a theoretical framework for assessing a technology environment from its properties such as complexity, uncertainty and disruptiveness.

Performance Excellence (CPE) have played a significant role in the practice of quality management, researchers have been slow to embrace the CPE framework. By viewing the CPE as an integrative model of organizational effectiveness that encompasses a number of cross-functional disciplines, one is led to speculate that a large body of literature relevant to the CPE framework exists. Indirectly, through their functional research, scholars from a variety of disciplines have been investigating the theoretical issues that embody the CPE. This article compares the strategic planning category of the CPE against the scholarly literature. The planning framework embedded in the CPE aligns considerably with the conceptual literature on strategic planning. These findings suggest some validity for the CPE framework, which demonstrates the translation of research into managerial practice and might inspire further research. Key words: action plans, long-range planning, strategy deployment, strategy development The Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence (CPE) are designed to help organizations enhance competitiveness through the delivery of everimproving value to customers and improvements of overall organizational performance and capabilities. The CPE serve as a basis for organizational self-assessments, as well as the basis for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Numerous state and local agencies (Bobrowski and Bantham 1994) and other countries (Powell 1995) have adopted similar award frameworks. As such, the CPE have attracted considerable industry interest. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which manages the National Quality Program

SHIL on the Web is the Website of the Israeli Citizens’ Advice Bureau. It provides information about rights, social benefits, government and public services and civil obligations. Activity on the site approaches 10,000 pages visited per day. It has interfaces in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. Logfile analysis of the SHIL Website revealed to our surprise that about 60.7% of the requests reaching SHIL from external sites (excluding requests from robots) are from general search engines (e.g. Google and MSN), and users reach a specific page on the site linked from the search results page. This finding seems to indicate that the site is not known well enough to the public. On the other hand the site is very active, thus it seems to serve Israeli citizens well, even without being a well known brand. In this paper we analyzed the external requests coming from search engines. The analysis is based on the 266,295 queries from search engines that reached SHIL during March-October 2005. Studying queries submitted to search engines is a novel technique for analyzing the access patterns to the site and provides a better understanding of the user needs and intentions than analyzing the distribution of the visited pages only. We are not aware of any previous study that analyzed the relation between the query submitted to the search engine and the Webpage the user clicked on the search results page. Since search engines provide snippets, when the user clicks on a specific page he/she already has some information on what is to be found on the page and the user makes a conscious decision to click on the specific result. Thus, this type of analysis provides additional information about the users’ actual information needs.

Abstract. Appraising the environmental context in which an organization deploys its activity is a necessity in order to make appropriate decisions and adapting strategies to a context in constant evolution, especially in a time where this context is increasingly complex, uncertain and disruptive. Decision makers therefore need more than ever better tools that aid them to analyze their environment, providing them the most pertinent information to take the most appropriate decisions. In this paper, we attempt to propose a set of reusable artifacts that would facilitate the development of decision support systems for assessing the organization's environment. In particular, we propose an ontology that defines the different elements that shall be taken into account in order to effectively and efficiently scan an environment. We then provide an overview of some analysis techniques and tools that could be useful to analyze, assess and visualize essential information about these elements. Finally, we present two decision support system prototypes that allow a partial analysis of the environment using appropriate interaction and visualization techniques. 1