What Is An Environmental Scan?
Whether you are planning a trip, or an excursion to buy groceries, or the direction of a corporation, you need to consider the larger external environment. For example, you want to go grocery shopping in the next town. You'd like to get this done as quickly as possible. So, you turn on the radio to listen to the traffic report. Oops. There's been an accident on the highway you usually take to get to the store. What do you do? You plan to take an alternate route that will keep you out of the traffic jam. You've done a limited form of environmental scan.
In terms of organizations and strategic planning, an environmental scan involves considering the factors that will influence the direction and goals of your organization. And, it includes consideration of both present and future factors that might affect the organization, since, of course, we're planning for the future, not just the present.
For example, an environmental scan might project that in the next ten years, the number of people (potential customers) between the ages of 18-24 will increase from 30% to 40%. That's important information if we want to decide what kinds of new products we might consider introducing into the marketplace. Should we work on developing products targeted at a dwindling seniors population? Or should we develop products to take advantage of the shift to a youth dominated market. The environmental scan forces us to look at these factors.
While some suggest the environmental scan should address only factors external to the organization (e.g. markets, legislation and government actions, demographics, marketing trends, etc), we suggest that you also do an INTERNAL ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN.
An internal environmental scan involves looking at the present capabilities of the organization (infrastructure, hardware, personnel, abilities, structure, etc) and that information can be compared to what the organization WILL need in the future to achieve its strategic goals.
See Also: What Is A Competitive Analysis?