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

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.

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

This paper addresses the topic of the assessment of an organization's external environment and more particularly the lack of research providing conceptual foundations for developing suitable strategic information systems supplying managers with the necessary information and analysis tools to consider the key environmental aspects that are relevant to strategic decision making. Inspired by research in the field of domain and enterprise ontologies, this paper argues that the development of a formal model of the environment would help solve this problem. As a result, this paper develops a conceptual model of the environment that assembles the available but scattered knowledge on this topic and translates it into a more formal form that may facilitate the creation of environmental Twenty Seventh International Conference on Information Systems, Milwaukee 2006 1 information systems and tools and demonstrates its usefulness by applying it to analyze a concrete environment.

Assessing the external environment is an important component of organizations' survival and success. Unfortunately, a huge amount of information must be collected and processed in order to obtain a thorough and comprehensive representation of the environment. A decision support system can be very useful in helping decision makers to organize and analyze this information efficiently and effectively. This paper outlines a conceptual proposition helping to design such a system by presenting an ontology of the relevant information elements (actors, issues and needs) and a set of tools to analyze them. This paper also illustrates a prototype version of one of these tools which supports the analysis of the actors and issues perspectives.

Managing an organization is a delicate art of achieving alignment between its various internal and external components. In particular, the alignment between an organization's strategy, its environment and its information system has traditionally been a key management issue and has been largely investigated. However, the contribution of information systems towards achieving alignment between these components has been much less considered. This paper presents a theoretical framework for designing a strategic DSS for assessing the organization's environment and evaluating its potential evolution scenarios.

Research in family business tends to concentrate on the founder and CEO but rarely discusses the importance of the board members in business development. It is the primary contention of this paper that social networks of small business board members have strong performance and growth implications. Analysis of 73 community bank CEO responses indicates that firms that use their board’s networks show higher ROA, ROE, and asset increase.

We extend the Western strategic management literature on environmental scanning to the entrepreneurial context by surveying business owners in two countries. Specifically, using the framework of Daft, Sormunen and Parks (1988), we test how perceived environmental uncertainty in seven environmental sectors and information accessibility influence scanning frequency of venture owners in the U.S. and India, two dissimilar entrepreneurial settings. Overall, entrepreneurs in India scan more frequently than do U.S. entrepreneurs, and the perceived rate of environmental change and accessibility of information are associated with their scanning. In the U.S., only perceived information accessibility prompts scanning. These results, which depart from inferences drawn from samples of managers in the Western literature, offer potential for extending scanning theory by cross-culturally broadening the theoretical nexus between organization theory, strategy and entrepreneurship in more fully understanding scanning behavior. Key Words: entrepreneurship, scanning, strategy 2 The literatures of organization theory and strategic management are replete with discussion of the influences of environmental complexity and volatility on organization decision-making, structure and