Environmental Scanning

Today Alane Wilson of OCLC spoke to the Education Institute and provided what she called an “amateur primer” on environmental scanning (ES)based on insights from It’s All Good blog that I mentioned in an earlier post on the topic of ES.

Alane discussed how ES at OCLC started with strategic planning efforts as one elements of the planning process. Alane, like most other planners & scanners, is not a professional futurist, came to the futures field accidentally. It is amazing the number of disciplines and avenues from which futurists emerge, like Ray Kurzweil, a current fixture at futurist conferences. She quoted from futurist, Peter Bishop, who said that futurists need two things — a facination and interest in change, and didn’t want an MBA.

The definition of ES from Alane’s primer describes it as an internal communication of external information that may influence your future. It is a tool to evaluate strengths and weaknesses. Even though there is no one template, or list of must do’s with ES — ES has to be relevant to your organization. There are often
common elements with ES in that they look at variety of landscapes to describe and co-ordinate trends such as ecomonic, social/sociological, technological, and other landscapes that might be relevant such as the local political environment if you are a community organization. Alane mentioned the RCMP environmental scan and that their organization changes their sensing compass for landscapes each year.

The scanner is the look out — not the navigator, first mate or captain. The scanner sees something on the horizon — rocks there, a pod of whales. Great analogy. The environmental scan must have top level support and an institutional purpose — what is it going to result in. Since it is an intensive process, it must lead to action, otherwise there is no point in reading and synthesizing mounds of information.

Alane talked about how fads can form trends and if fads have longevity may become a trend. An example, there are many social spaces for young adults, and that is an important trend, but at this point she’s not sure how to translate that into the library world. But if 95% of the students at the University of Washington are part of Facebook, it has to mean something!

The environmental scan has to be actionable, part of the bigger planning process.
For OCLC it is a business tool, a planning document for the board of trustees and senior management team. It is an early tool in the planning process. In the case of OCLC it has led to fast tracking of OCLC’s Open WorldCat – OCLC’s way of opening up library metadata to Google, Yahoo, Askjeeves – because of trends in their ES. It has also led to more study, and their most recent publication, Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources which helps them to understand the scan by looking at perceptions.