Four on-line, full-text sources were employed to retrieve the data:

• Lexis-Nexis (Elsevier)
• ABI/Inform (University Microfilms Inc.)
• Infotrac (Information Access Company)
• Wall Street Journal On-Disc (Dow Jones)
• World Wide Web (WWW) search engine, Yahoo

The resulting list of citations was reviewed and ninety-one (91) articles were identified and retrieved for further investigation. These articles were chosen because their headlines suggested that they contained some information contained that addressed at least one of the OrgCon questions.

Each of the selected articles was submitted to an iterative, multi-step content analysis.

1. The first step entailed re-evaluating the "relevant" articles. The lead paragraph of each article was read and the article was coded as Relevant or Not Relevant. The most frequent reason for coding an article as Not Relevant was because it reported information already contained in another source(s).
2. The relevant articles (80) were then read in their entirety and the pertinent passages (sentence, quotation, paragraph, figures, etc.) were assigned to one or more of the following categories of OrgCon questions: (1) Current Configuration, (2) Current Complexity, (3) Current Formalization, (4) Current Centralization, (5) Size, (6) Age/Ownership, (7) Product Diversity, (8) Technology, (9) Environment, (10) Management Preferences, (11) Strategic Factors, and (12) Climate Factors.
   Many articles contained information on more than one category. An example of a pertinent passage is given below: "(The) price (of medical equipment) is a secondary issue and there are minimal price differentials among the major manufacturers. The key purchasing issues are technology, service and reliability." This passage was assigned to the "Strategy" group, particularly to the question that concerns the price levels of an organization's products relative to those of its competitors.
3. The next step in analyzing the content was the transforming it into the appropriate format for use in OrgCon. This was necessary because the information required to answer OrgCon questions rarely appears in the required format (i.e., measurement scale) that answers require.
4. The final step in the content analysis was to assign a certainty factor (cf) to each answer. Certainty factors are used in OrgCon to indicate the strength of belief concerning an input or a design recommendation.
   • Where answers were relatively clear and unambiguous, a certainty factor of 100 was used.
   • The lowest certainty factor used was 70 and this was reserved for questions that required a great deal of inference or "best-guessing" on the part of the investigator.
   • Certainty factors of 85 were used for answers falling between these two extremes.