The Quality of Prior Information Structure in Business Planning - An Experiment in Environmental Scanning

Abstract

Increasing attention has been devoted in recent years to the firm’s ability to adapt its marketing strategies to a rapidly changing environment. Given that the abundance of news, reports, and announcements found in new electronic environments such as the WWW hampers an extensive manual search, computer-based systems have become important supportive tools for business planning purposes. Several studies investigate the impact of managerial traits on this question, however the potential influence of an inadequate information structure in automatic information-seeking tools is rarely addressed.

In this paper, we examine the effect of the quality of the information structure in automated information-seeking tasks. We use a prototypic system that aims to detect and to evaluate relevant information about financial markets, and systematically contaminate the information structure by index terms referring to an adjacent but different task. Empirical evidence from an experimental evaluation of documents from the Reuters text collection substantiates the relevance of the prior information structure to the automated information search.