In the old days developing strategy was the domain of the top levels of most organizations, but the Knowledge Age has changed the game by giving those all across an organization strategic thinking responsibilities. Jeff De Cagna talks about this change and how information professionals fit into the new way of developing strategy.

While information professionals often plan without thinking when operating on relatively known information from the past and present and there is little uncertainty in their ability to carry out the plan, the situation can change when the unknowable, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous increases. Stuart Wells explains how librarians can use strategic planning to combat these situations.

Almost everyone, including information professionals, needs a strategic plan. Given the importance and ubiquity of information and knowledge today, strategy, and strategic plans are morenot lessimportant to librarians. But there is no easy way to create a strategic plan and building one takes a lot of work. Alvin L. Jacobson and JoAnne L. Sparks discuss and illustrate four points of designing and building a strategic plan.

Industry consolidations, mergers, the explosion in technology, and globalization are changing the world. This change is forcing organizations to look for ways to brace for the future and one of the best ways to do this is scenario planning. Joe Willmore takes a look at scenario planning from the need to develop a focal point to the analysis of the scenario.

With the constant barrage of e-mail, voicemail, the scarcest resource in today's business world might be human attention. This is a belief held by Tom Davenport, director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change and co-author (with John Beck) of The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Information Outlook sat down with Davenport to discuss attention spans and other subjects.