Improving Strategic Scanning Information Analysis: An Alternative Measure for Information Proximity Evaluation

Strategic Scanning activities become less effective when faced with managing information overload. This paper introduces "nearness measure" (NM), a measure for information proximity evaluation. We also present and analyze the principles and properties of a graphical representation of the measure. We compare the measure to the usual Cosine similarity (CS). Even when the algorithm that calculates NM between texts is larger than CS in terms of complexity, NM with a minimization phase expresses an analysis of the documents from the general to the specific that is the opposite to what CS does. Thus, the manager using NM would require less time to explore collected information.