Strategic Surveillance

Compared to premise control and implementation control, strategic surveillance is designed to be a relatively unfocused, open, and broad search activity.

"... strategic surveillance is designed to monitor a broad range of events inside and outside the company that are likely to threaten the course of the firm's strategy."

The basic idea behind strategic surveillance is that some form of general monitoring of multiple information sources should be encouraged, with the specific intent being the opportunity to uncover important yet unanticipated information.

Strategic surveillance appears to be similar in some way to "environmental scanning." The rationale, however, is different. Environmental, scanning usually is seen as part of the chronological planning cycle devoted to generating information for the new plan.

By way of contrast, strategic surveillance is designed to safeguard the established strategy on a continuous basis.

Special Alert Control

Another type of strategic control is a special alert control.

"A special alert control is the need to thoroughly, and often rapidly, reconsider the firm's basis strategy based on a sudden, unexpected event."

The analysts of recent corporate history are full of such potentially high impact surprises (i.e., natural disasters, chemical spills, plane crashes, product defects, hostile takeovers etc.).

While Pearce and Robinson suggest that special alert control be performed only during strategy implementation, Preble recommends that because special alert controls are really a subset of strategic surveillance that they be conducted throughout the entire strategic management process.

The characteristics of each control component are detailed in Table 6-4, including the component's purpose, mechanism used to implement it, the procedure to be followed, degree of focusing, information sources, and organizational/personnel to be utilized.