Sometimes a brief sentence can be more useful than loading volumes of encyclopedias on our desktop. John Mahaffie (2008) has regarded scanning as “the core of a good foresight work” and “a proven and powerful tool that you can use to study the full context in which your company will operate over the next years.” The essence of scanning may be summarized as the personal capability of a futurist in diagnosing and monitoring different types of change as: Cycles, Trends, Emerging Issues, and Wild Cards (Gary and Bishop, 2006).

Yet, we always need to upgrade our environmental scanning practice. We should accept that monitoring an organization's internal and external environments for clues to change (that could mean new threats and opportunities) is deferent from what was conducted in 10 or 20 years ago. The old approaches were often troublesome, narrow, weak, and too complex. They were usually limited to a small group of people and a periodic process—the strategic planning team and its every-few-year cycle. We are lucky today to live in an Internet-motivated era equipped with tools that we can use to enable, enliven, and energize our scanning activities.
There are great tools for environmental scanning, for finding, cataloging, and sharing information.

There are constant innovations and often improvements in the tools available, so it makes sense to make ourselves students of the digital scanning tools. You can use: Google Alerts, e-newsletters, listservs and RSS feeds. In addition, “iGoogle” is a highly customizable web interface you can set it as your home or default screen, ensuring that you'll see key information regularly. Complete your subscription to WFS and Shaping Tomorrow e-newsletters. They are trusted and essential sources that worth subscribing to, and if you get them by email, you are automatically reminded of new content. Also try Yahoo and Google futurist groups’ listservs. Getting a regular email digest of important listservs can keep you connected to particular STEEP topics or communities.

If you know other online services in addition to: Dvice, Delicious, Evernote, Wetpaint, Diigo, and Posterous, please share them with me. Thank you.

Reference:
Gary, Jay E. & Bishop, Peter (2006). Identifying Change. Unit 4 Reading, LMSF 602 Course Materials, Regent University, p. 16.
Mahaffie, John (September 3, 2008). Ideas on effective environmental scanning in the digital age. Retrieved from: http://foresightculture.com/category/environmental-scanning