Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Appliquées à la Gestion

Targeting consists of defining the part of the business environment that corresponds to organizations’ strategic objectives and priorities. Targeting is not an easy process because it would imply the interaction of managers coming from different units of the organization that might have a fragmentary and blurred understanding of the overall issue to be scanned. Through an action research, we designed and evaluated a GSS to help managers target strategic scanning in fuzzy contexts. Evaluations through interventions in 10 organizations allowed participants achieve relevant targeting which allow to propose four major improvements: (1) the use of suggested lists of actors and topics as starting points to trigger and facilitate discussions, (2) the definition of actor and topic importance to produce useful targeting results, (3) the evaluation of the organization’s perceived capacity to be informed early enough, and (4) a mechanism to signal scanning relevancy in the short-, mid- or long-term. From a management perspective, our results help managers in their strategic scanning activity by : (1) identifying information needs for strategic scanning of fuzzy subjects, (2) reducing risk of strategic scanning failure, (3) establishing assessment of organizational scanning capacities, (4) identifying scanning priorities according to a temporal horizon and (5) fostering teamwork participation.