There are four approaches to the organization of environmental scanning:

Line management: Functional managers like sales and marketing create a team in order to conduct environmental scanning in addition to their existing duties. Disadvantages of line management are resistance to imposition of additional duties, lack of specialist research and analytical skills required for scanners.

Strategic planner: Environmental scanning is made part of strategic planner’s job in a company. The drawback of this approach is that a head office planner may not have a deep understanding of a business unit’s activities in order to perform the environmental scanning.

Separate organizational unit: Company sets a separate organizational unit which is responsible for disseminating relevant information to managers. For instance, General Electric company uses such a system. A dedicated team concentrating its efforts on environmental scanning is the advantage of separate organizational units, but it is very costly for small and/or not-for-profit organizations.

Joint line/general management teams: To identify needs, trends and issues that may affect business, a temporary planning team is set up. These teams are made of line and general (corporate) management.