Environmental Scanning

Environmental scanning is the process of gathering information about events and their relationships within an organization's internal and external environments. The basic purpose of environmental scanning is to help management determine the future direction of the organization.

Thomas Edison State University uses a continuous scanning system in which committee members meet monthly to discuss internal and external events that have the potential to affect the way the University does business. These events can include student enrollment trends, in climate weather or natural disasters, world events, funding, federal legislation, marketing, etc. Monthly findings are then aggregated quarterly and dispersed to all University staff.

The Environmental Scanning Committee is a valuable resource to management, allowing it to make decisions influenced from trended analysis of historical events to project future events. The committee also assists in creating action plans to address these upcoming events, reviewing action plans and appropriating resources for those plans, and putting management in contact with fellow staff members with the knowledge base to provide quality data for decision making.