The monitoring of strategic information from the external environment by small companies

Abstract

The aim of this work is to study the practice of monitoring strategic information from the external environment in small companies, and its importance lies in the fact that studies on small companies and on monitoring are still incipient in Brazil. The research can be characterized as a survey, with the application of a questionnaire to be answered by the managers of the units studied. Among the main results obtained are the findings that companies favor the monitoring of some aspects of the environment, to the detriment of others, that they use only a small number of sources of information and that the barriers to effective monitoring seem to be a consequence of the managerial profile of the respondents rather than the result of limitations of resources, whether human or financial.