Strategic tools for RIM professionals: three strategic competencies--vision, electronic scanning, and scenario planning--can work together to support an organization's overall strategic process. (Management Wise).

At the Core

This article:

* Introduces three professional strategic tools

* Explains how they can support an organization's strategic plan

"Strategic planning provides a vision of what you want to become, a way of describing the end state toward which you are journeying, and then the process for getting there." So wrote Ray Stata in his 1988 Interfaces article, "The Role of the Chief Executive Officer in Articulating the Vision."

"In this sense," he wrote, "every individual uses strategic planning to help take charge of his life since it provides a personal vision of what one wants to become, a description of the end state of the journey, and a road map for getting there."

Eugenia K. Brumm was most definitely referring to the application of strategic thought as applied at the organizational level when she wrote that "RIM managers have acquired the knowledge and expertise to manage information tactically [emphasis added], from birth to death, but to think strategically [emphasis added] requires them to learn how to

* develop an awareness of the organization's core capabilities

* understand the vulnerabilities of the organization

* understand the industry--the line of business that the organization is in

* understand the associated industries

* understand the competition

* understand the place of the organization in relation to its competitors"

The following three tools can help fulfill these requirements for RIM professionals who want to think and act strategically: vision, environmental scanning (also called "strategic intelligence"), and scenario planning. This trio of strategic competencies can interact with and support each other as well as an organization's overall strategic process.

What is Vision?

No strategic management topic has received more commentary in the past decade than vision. And, with the public's heightened sensitivity to issues of corporate governance, this interest will intensify. As the debate on leadership and vision is re-framed around such issues, the "integrity" variable in the definition of what constitutes vision will increase.

The problem with defining vision is that asking 10 management experts what a vision is will likely result in 10 different answers. In his book, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, Peter Senge suggests that vision is "A picture of the future you seek to create, described in the present tense, as if it were happening now. A statement of `our vision' shows where we want to go and what we will be like when we get there." Senge notes that "Because it is of tangible and immediate quality, a vision gives shape and direction to the organization's future. And it helps people set goals to take the organization closer."

Brumm calls vision "the single most important factor for leadership success." New quantitative research supports and even expands on this contention to include not merely success in leadership but in the organization as well. According to Warren G. Bennis in his 1989 book On Becoming a Leader, "The first basic ingredient of leadership is a guiding vision. The leader has a clear idea of what [he] wants to do--professionally and personally--and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures. Unless you know where you're going, and why, you cannot possibly get there."

While a vision need not be written to be effective (though most are), it must contain certain elements. A powerful and effective vision will

* look forward in time (future-oriented)

* point toward some better reality to be achieved

* contain references implicitly or explicitly to important values

* appeal to these values in a call to action

Virtually all visions contain these elements, regardless of how they are constructed or communicated. But what do visions accomplish? Anyone fortunate enough to work in an organization with a strong vision understands the power of effective vision because they see it every day. There are the inevitable distractions of emergencies and daily crises requiring immediate solution, but amidst this daily grind, people in a vision-driven organization have a sense of where they are going and why. This sense informs their activities, giving the work meaning beyond the immediacy of the latest predicament.

In Visionary Leadership, Burt Nanus says articulating the right vision is the toughest task of a true leader but also the test of great leaders. When it is finally achieved, "The organization is already well on its way to the realization of the dream [i.e., vision]. To understand why, consider the forces that are unleashed.

* The right vision attracts commitment and energizes people.

* The right vision creates meaning in employees' lives.

* The right vision established a standard of excellence.

* The right vision bridges the present and future."

If the organization does indeed have a clear and effective vision, the next step in practicing RIM strategically might be to create a departmental vision. If the existing organizational vision is powerful, explicit, and effective, the job of creating a parallel or supporting departmental vision should be relatively easy. A likely approach would be to create a smaller, mirror-like departmental vision that supports the larger organizational vision.

A RIM department wishing to create a supporting vision statement could start by emphasizing its departmental commitment to the wider organizational vision. From there would be movement toward a clear, explicit, and in-depth analysis of how the core competencies of the department specifically--and the RIM profession generally--can support this organizational vision. This might, among other things, emphasize the quality of information in the organization (e.g., currency, credibility, completeness, accessibility). All strategic tools, including environmental scanning (ES), SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, and scenario construction, can contribute to this understanding--especially when used from the strategic perspective of the RIM group and toward the larger organization's strategic objectives.

Environmental Scanning

A vision supports both the ES and scenario creation process. These in turn feed back into the vision creation and rejuvenation process. ES is an outwardly focused information-gathering activity that supports strategic organizational activities, not the least of which is vision creation and rejuvenation, scenario planning, as well as functional, departmental, and organizational SWOT analysis. Like vision planning, the ultimate goal of these activities is to support more effective decision making, improve organizational planning, and change daily behavior throughout the organization in support of its strategic objectives.

ES has many of the characteristics of its better-known strategic cousin, competitive intelligence (CI). Another common term to describe the activity of collecting information in support of larger strategic activities is strategic intelligence. The difference is found in the depth and scope of the information gathered. Strategic intelligence and ES suggest a scope and reach in information-gathering activities that are broader than CI. The most frequently voiced criticism of CI is that it focuses too much on the competitor and what it has already done (past tense), thus relegating it to a following rather than a leadership role.

CI vs. ES

In CI, information-gathering activities, by definition, focus on what has obvious competitive ramifications for the organization. Examples include trends in prices paid by suppliers for raw materials and labor, or average income and disposable income trends for the organization's client base. ES, like CI, certainly appears to fall within the bounds of the organization's industry and existing customer base as that which obviously impacts the organization. But, unlike CI, ES takes into account the larger environment beyond the bounds of the immediate business and industry. This scope includes larger social, technological, ecological, economic, and political environments that influence the entire realm of human experience. Looking further beyond the immediate environment is also a correlate of looking further into the future, another strategic concept inherent in ES.

A major concern in the ES process is the need to ensure a balance of information acquisition from various information domains. One classification system known as STEEP (social, technological, ecological, environmental, and political) is a guide used to assure a balanced approach to information-gathering activities. An organizational scanning function will systematically collect information from all the domains on a regular basis. This ensures that while everyone focuses on technology (increasingly an occupational hazard of people in planning functions), something else of significance from the political or another area does not come out of the blue to "bite" the organization. How and what is scanned, like building scenarios and working on vision, will depend on what is to be achieved.

Information Location Tools

The Internet, along with software developed for Internet searching, has made ES much easier than it was just a few years ago. Some of the bibliographic-type software that makes ES and online research easier includes Biblioscape, Endnote, Pro-Cite, and Reference Manager. These include powerful online search features that go far beyond a standard Internet search engine, such as Yahoo or Google. Originally conceived as research tools to track references in academic papers, the addition of online search features transforms the programs into powerful ES tools.

Online newsletters, many of which are free, cover a number of issues from the narrowest to the broadest scope. Likewise, listserves, newsgroups, and blogs (a personal Web site updated frequently) are revolutionizing ES because they allow easy exploration of fringe sources. For example, New Jour provides an excellent guide to thousands of online newsletters, and StratVantage offers a guide to online business-to-business e-commerce, a phenomenon whose strategic impact is still emerging. Lsoft is a guide to both listserve software and virtually all listserves available. Subscribing to a listserve, even should one choose not to directly contribute to the dialogue, can be a powerful method of tracking "the buzz" inside a professional community.

Governmental sources of data also offer a great well of ES information. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) are only three U.S. government agencies that require companies to submit information filings to comply with a variety of financial, environmental, health, and safety regulations. Much of this information is available for the asking or can be retrieved on the agencies' Web sites.

Industry-based associations can be a helpful resource for industry analysis. If trying to institute an ES process at a strategic level, contact an industry's association representatives. They can point out good industry sources of data, which frequently include sophisticated analysis. Reference librarians at larger public, university, or organizational libraries have access to a diverse set of tools and knowledge, many of which are not widely available. When applied to a focused ES program, these information professionals can be invaluable.

Conceptual Frameworks for Scanning

Michael Porter's classic "Five Forces Model of Industry Structure" can serve as a conceptual framework for understanding information important in the scanning process. At the root of Porter's model is industry structural analysis.

The SWOT matrix on p. 65 is another example of a conceptual model in matrix form. In this case, SWOT makes up the x-axis. The vertical axis represents the individual elements that comprise the Five Forces model. The matrix leads to questions regarding the application of an ES process. Looking at the intersection of "suppliers" and "strength," for example, one might ask, "What are the strengths of our suppliers relative to their direct competitors (that is to say our other potential vendors)?" With this knowledge--and a general understanding of information resources--one can create an information acquisition agenda.

SWOT analysis using ES data is a technique of developing both a clear understanding of the core competencies of a business unit within the organization as well as those of the organization itself. Additionally, SWOT is a useful technique for understanding the organization's vulnerabilities, which is important in practicing strategic information management (SIM).

ES Product Format

A brief newsletter published regularly can be an excellent way of condensing ES results into meaningful information for those in the organization. The objective is to produce actionable information. This kind of output will be particularly relevant to the organization's highest-level decision makers, as they want what they see as knowledge rather than information. Peter Drucker said that "What we call the Information Revolution is actually a Knowledge Revolution ... [t]he key is not electronics; it is cognitive science."

Scenario Planning

In his classic, Competitive Advantage, Porter defines a scenario as "an internally consistent view of what the future might turn out to be." But at the most fundamental level, any future-oriented story can be called a scenario. Thus, a novel, or even a movie, might qualify as a scenario.

In the military or in disaster planning, scenarios may comprise full-scale physical simulations instead of the primarily cognitive exercise suggested by Porter's definition. It is also a scenario when an emergency medical center wants to prepare for the possibility of a bio-terrorist attack by holding full-scale simulations in which people participate as various players (e.g. doctors, emergency services personnel, and mock patients).

In "Scenario Building and Scenario Planning: State of the Art and Prospects of Evolution," Antonio Martelli suggests that scenario planning is a term that can be applied to any group using any informal anticipation of future trends and events. This use of the term leaves the process open to a broad range of strategic applications.

Some scenarios are "global" or "macro." These deal with large-scale views, including the global economy and political environment. Industry scenarios as defined by Porter include those that portray possible future events and trends relative to a specific industry. Finally, "what if ..." scenarios paint specific pictures of "what might happen to A if B occurs," according to Liam Fahey's Management Review article "Scenario Learning."

Frequently, scenario planning and strategic planning are incorrectly used interchangeably. Scenario planning should be seen, along with ES and vision, as one tool within a larger tool bag of strategic planning tools and competencies. Scenario planning as a component--increasingly, the major component--of strategic planning has grown markedly.

In the service of scenario development, the ES output will need to be denser, broader, and longer. It will identify trends in politics, social life, technology, and will include less finished intelligence than the aforementioned newsletter. This is because the principle purpose of scenarios themselves is the development of insight and challenges to the existing mental models of decision makers. For them, Pierre Wack writes in "Scenarios: Shooting the Rapids," the function of the scenario is not so much to predict the future as to re-perceive reality in order to find new opportunities--and to avoid danger.

Growth in scenario planning answers the criticism that the world's volatility and unpredictability render useless more traditional strategic planning approaches. The main purpose of scenario planning, in fact, is not to predict the future but to consider a range of future possibilities.

Creating Scenarios

Scenarios match, in a natural and fundamental way, how humans evolved to deal with the uncertainty and unpredictability of daily life. One cannot predict the future in any useful or dependable way, but one can prepare for it.

In scenario development, preparation involves serious thinking about 1) the many things that could happen, 2) the likelihood they will happen, and 3) a consideration of the response(s) in each case. Thus, to prepare without predicting--which is impossible in any case--one must create scenarios. Humans do this each day as they navigate through their daily activities as an adaptive means of dealing with the world. For example, one scenario might be: "If he counter offers me $25, I'll counter with $15. But if he accepts my first offer, I'll be more flexible with the delivery date." Scenario planning as a strategic tool is a formalized and expanded form of this inherently human thought process applied at a departmental or organizational level.

A few benefits and outcomes of scenario creation include

* development of the understanding of complex systems

* anticipation of real world behavior

* understanding unconscious assumptions about the business and market

* understanding organizational core competencies

* identification of opportunities in emerging markets

* contribution to contingency planning

* quickening organizational response in the face of crisis, change, and chaos

* creating "robust" organizational strategy

There is good reason to believe that scenarios can be a powerful tool for increasing awareness of RIM's value to the larger organization as well as promoting strategic RIM initiatives to organizational decision makers. Whatever the reason, however, having a clear and shared understanding of the purpose before creating any scenario is neither superficial nor trivial. In fact, there is no more serious question to address before beginning the process.

Porter's use of scenarios is geared toward determination of industry structure and competitive strategy. Peter Schwartz believes scenarios work best when created with a specific question in mind, such as "Should we build that new plant," "Should we try to acquire a new company," or perhaps, "Are we sufficiently protecting our information against catastrophic loss?" Using the scenario as a tool to answer a specific question, Schwartz proposes the following eight-step process to scenario creation:

1. Identify focal issue or decision.

2. Identify key forces in the local environment.

3. Determine driving forces.

4. Rank the key factors and driving trends.

5. Create and select the scenario logic.

6. Flesh out the scenarios.

7. Derive implications.

8. Select leading indicators and signposts.

Both vision creation and ES contribute to the process. Vision may add to the definition of a focal issue or decision (Step 1) as a means of achieving the vision. Steps 2 through 5 will also benefit from input from the ES process. By the same token, Steps 7 and 8 will naturally tend to feed back into the model and focus of the ES process as well as into the vision update/rejuvenation process. For a system overview of how the three strategic competencies--vision, ES, and scenario planning--can interact and support each other and an overall organizational strategic process, see the illustration at left.

RIM Connection

One of the most apparent benefits of scenario planning for RIM managers is its value as a means of sharing within an organization the urgency of addressing records and information issues. This strategy is supported by Wack's observation that one of the most beneficial outcomes of scenarios is analysis and understanding of risk. Risk avoidance is one of the more powerful underlying and well-understood justifications for a comprehensive RIM program, and scenarios are a powerful way of communicating this.

Scenarios are an excellent way to evaluate and communicate risk to decision makers. For a RIM manager, creating various information scenarios that describe possible implications for different records and information strategies in light of potential events (e.g., cyber-terrorist attack) can be a powerful tool that contributes to creative thinking, strategy formulation, contingency planning, and risk assessment.

Use of the tools by anyone at any level--personal, professional, or organizational--has proven beneficial in contributing to organizationally relevant strategic thinking and purposes. When any RIM manager begins to use these tools to support larger organizational issues, there will be immediate and measurable results for all involved. However, these tools, like all tools, will reflect the abilities of the user rather than those of the tool.

An added benefit of this organizationally relevant perspective is that it encourages executives to consider how these RIM issues are important to the larger organization while it heightens RIM's relevance within the organization. The results are never immediate, and they are always far from assured. That is, alas, always the nature of "the strategic."

Vision, ES, and scenario creation can contribute directly to the competencies identified by Brumm as critical to any RIM manager practicing strategically. They are easy tools to add to the existing core competencies of RIM managers without requiring a radical transformation of daily activities. They also are ideal first steps on the road to strategic information management. After all, it is always less risky to employ a strategy that is important in addition to what one already understands as being important, rather than one that will serve as a substitute to everything already in place. A RIM manager might adopt this approach when seeking the greatest potential personal and organizational reward with the least personal and organizational risk.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

SWOT Conceptual Model

              Strength   Weakness   Opportunity   Threat
Suppliers

Potential
Entrants

Substitutes

Buyers

Industry
Competitor
Rivalries

References

Bennis, Warren G. On Becoming a Leader. Boston: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1989.

Brumm, Eugenia K. "Making the Leap." InfoPro. June 2001.

Drucker, Peter. Managing in the Next Society. New York: Truman Talley Books--St. Martin's Press, 2002.

Fahey, Liam. "Scenario Learning." Management Review. March 2000. Vol. 89, Issue 3.

Martelli, Antonio. "Scenario Building and Scenario Planning: State of the Art and Prospects of Evolution." Futures Research Quarterly. Summer 2001.

Nanus, Burt. Visionary Leadership. Hoboken, N.J.: Jossey-Bass, 1992.

Porter, Michael E. Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York: Free Press, 1985.

Schwartz, Peter. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1991.

Senge, Peter, et al. The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1994.

Stata, Ray. "The Role of the Chief Executive Officer in Articulating the Vision," Interfaces. May/June 1988.

Wack, Pierre. "Scenarios: Shooting the Rapids." Harvard Business Review. November/December 1985.

READ MORE ABOUT IT

Celente, Gerald and Tom Milton. Trend Tracking: Find Out How to Transform Trends into Opportunity and Profits. New York: Time Warner Books, 1991.

Cook, L. "The State Scanning Network: An Issue Identification System For State Policy Managers." Futures Research Quarterly. Spring 1986.

Fahey, L., and W.R. King. "Environmental Scanning For Corporate Planning." Business Horizons. August 1977.

Gardner, Howard. Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Goleman, Daniel. "Leadership That Gets Results." Harvard Business Review. March/April 2000.

Heracleous, Loizos. "Strategic Thinking or Strategic Planning?" Long Range Planning. 1998, Vol. 31, No. 3.

Orndoff, Keith. "Developing Strategic Competencies: A Starting Point." The Information Management Journal. July/August 2002.

Simpson, Daniel G. "Why Most Strategic Planning is a Waste of Time and What You Can Do About It--Part I." Long Range Planning. Vol. 31, No. 3, 1998.

--. "Why Most Strategic Planning is a Waste of Time and What You Can Do About It--Part II." Long Range Planning. Vol. 31, No. 4, 1998.

Von Krogh, Georg, Ikujiro Nonaka, and Manfred Aben. "Making the Most of Your Company's Knowledge: A Strategic Framework." Long Range Planning. Vol. 34, 2001.

Keith Orndoff is President of Future Impact Education. He is a contract futurist with companies including General Motors and the Texas Center for Superconductivity. He presents seminars and workshops on strategic planning. He may be contacted at [e-mail].