*ICIS Paper:* Personal Information Systems for Strategic Scanning in Turbulent Environments: Can the CEO Go On-Line?

As the business environment becomes more complex and dynamic, it becomes increasingly vital for top executives to scan the information environment to identify strategic threats and opportunities. This article seeks to understand the strategic scanning behaviors of top executives in order to provide some guidelines for the possibility of designing computer-based systems to support and enhance these scanning processes. The characteristics of the strategic scanning process are investigated through an empirical study of 37 chief executive officers of small to medium-sized high technology companies. Results show that they are very systematic scanners when it comes to strategic information, and that their information sources are limited, mostly personal, and external to the organization. This suggest that a computer-based system for strategic scanning would probably have to be a customized personal system, not tightly coupled to the organizational information system.