Environment Scanning for What Reasons Do Organizations

Environment Scanning For What Reasons Do Organizations Need An Awareness of Their Environment Competitive pressure, globalization and the continuing economic turbulence and uncertainty of the world's leading nations all contribute to a level of risk that businesses have never seen before. Continually being aware and monitoring their environments gives businesses of all sizes an opportunity to anticipate significant shifts in customer demand and react accordingly. The intent of this paper is to provide insights into the many factors that drive organizations to have a greater awareness of their global environment.

Striving Towards Agility and Risk Management The most common factor that drives businesses of all sizes to continually stay aware of their environment is the need to always stay in step with their customers, markets, and their unmet needs. The need for being responsive to the market is a critical one that underscores every successful organization globally today (Ball, Lorange, 1979). Organizations develop a highly-tuned sense of the markets they compete in specifically for the purpose of monitoring their competitors, their competitive intensity, and direction with new initiatives (Cui, Griffith, Cavusgil, 2005).

Developing an awareness and monitoring program to ensure a high level of market-driven responsiveness is critical to any successful long-term strategic planning process (Fahey, King, Narayanan, 1981). The first step to all of these factors and their attainment is the investment by organizations in creating effective environmental awareness and monitoring systems that can provide advance information on market and competitive conditions. Another aspect of developing environmental awareness relates to how effectively a company manages its supply chain or not.

For many organizations, their supply chains are the most critical link in their business models, and economic uncertainty can cause them to be disrupted, further disrupting the performance of the business itself (Kuei, Madu, Lin, 2011). Environmental awareness allows these companies to have value chains that more closely align to the needs of the market, managing suppliers, resellers and channel partners to more effective measures of performance over time (Rugman, 1985).

Developing systems that concentrate on capturing awareness of the market and quantifying it as a means to quantify market opportunities and risks are crucial for any business to stay profitable over the long-term (Fahey, King, Narayanan, 1981). In addition, market scoping and environmental awareness programs have proven to be influential in creating globalization plans that show a higher potential level of performance as well (Wu, Costa, Teare, 1998).

Conclusion The world is getting more turbulent every day from a social-economic perspective, which forces business to continually focus on reducing risk and increasing value delivered. Having an awareness of the environment provides companies with the necessary intelligence to better manage and quantify financial risks over time (Cui, Griffith, Cavusgil, 2005) while also selectively choosing opportunities to respond and capitalize on (Ball, Lorange, 1979). References Ball, Ben C., Jr., and Lorange, Peter. 1979. Managing Your Strategic Responsiveness to the Environment. Managerial Planning.