Answer:
External information.
Step-by-step explanation:
Environmental scanning is a management strategy that focuses on systematically acquiring informations about occasions, trends, events or patterns through surveys and analysis of these information in an organisation's external and internal environment. The informations acquired through environmental scanning is then used by the executive management in strategically planning the organisation's future and exploitation of available opportunities for the success of the organization.
The external environmental scanning is typically based on external information and it gives an overview of the opportunities in the market as well as potential threats to an organization.
The following are descriptive of an external information source for decision making;
1. Used as a tool for corporations to avoid strategic surprise.
2. Used to monitor, evaluate, and disseminate information relevant to the organizational development of strategy.
3. Used to determine a firm's competitive advantage.
4. Used as a tool to ensure a corporation's long-term health.
Hence, if a decision maker has trade journals and newspaper clippings about other companies, they tend to work with external information because they are informations outside the boundaries of the company.