The external organizational environment and its impact on management information systems

It is argued in this paper that organizations are “living purposeful” or “adaptively rational” systems whose survival depends on their ability to interact successfully, on a continual basis, with the surrounding environment. Three states of the external organizational environment — controllable, partially controllable and uncontrollable — are identified, and the information characteristics of each state are discussed. The approaches that organizations can adopt to collect information on the environment are also discussed; these approaches use externally-based data sources and modeling and/or analytic techniques. On these bases, we consider effective strategies and methodologies which organizations can adopt for processing, evaluating and communicating information about the external environment to satisfy decision-making requirements.