Viewing Systems as Services: A Fresh Approach in the IS Field

Despite wide agreement that we are in a service-dominated economy, there has been little movement toward treating service and service metaphors as core aspects of the IS field. This tutorial proposes that viewing systems as services is a potentially fruitful but generally unexplored approach for thinking about systems in organizations, systems analysis, and numerous applications of IT. An extension of past research in several areas, viewing systems as services proves to be an umbrella for developing new systems analysis and design methods, improving business/IT communication, and finding practical paths toward greater relevance and significance in business and society

Conceptual Systems Security Analysis Aerial Refueling Case Study

In today’s highly interconnected and technology reliant environment, systems security is rapidly growing in importance to complex systems such as automobiles, airplanes, and defense-oriented weapon systems. While systems security analysis approaches are critical to improving the security of these advanced cyber-physical systems-of-systems, such approaches are often poorly understood and applied in ad hoc fashion. To address these gaps, first a study of key architectural analysis concepts and definitions is provided with an assessment of their applicability towards complex cyber-physical systems. From this initial work, a definition of cybersecurity architectural analysis for cyber-physical systems is proposed. Next, the System Theory Theoretic Process Analysis approach for Security (STPA Sec) is tailored and presented in three phases which support the development of conceptual-level security requirements, applicable design-level criteria, and architectural-level security specifications. This work uniquely presents a detailed case study of a conceptual-level systems security analysis of a notional aerial refueling system based on the tailored STPA-Sec approach. This work is critically important for advancing the science of systems security engineering by providing a standardized approach for understanding security, safety, and resiliency requirements in complex systems with traceability and testability

Redeveloping Regional Economies for Present and Future Generations: Prosperity for People Within Ecological Limits

Many scientists and scholars believe the world is headed toward multiple ecological and social crises during the lifetime of much of the world\u27s population. If they are correct, a shift in how economies work will be necessary. We will no longer be able to rely on the ever expanding use of natural resources with the attendant pollution from their extraction, processing, transport, disposal, and social costs including civil disruptions and wars associated with greater scarcity. A number of proposals have been made that offer either comprehensive or partial solutions to the regional and global dimensions of these impending crises. One intriguing voluntary and business-oriented solution proposes a framework for trustees for future generations to access sufficient capital for the redevelopment of local economies. They would use the funds, principally raised by long-term bonds, to solicit competitive proposals from business and other partnerships to contract to deliver carefully measured outcomes needed by both current and future generations. This paper critically analyzes this solution and reviews other proposed or existing solutions. It concludes that this new approach should be evaluated and demonstrated along with others to test the viability of tools that could be used to achieve both necessary short and essential long-term outcomes. New tools include long-term finance for life cycle measured outcomes, an institutional framework for contracts with businesses and others to deliver the outcomes, including early replacement of the most problematic infrastructure and systems, and ultimately market mechanisms to enhance revenue from aggregation and sale of standardized outcomes to the global finance community

Improving Requirements Generation Thoroughness in User-Centered Workshops: The Role of Prompting and Shared User Stories

The rise of stakeholder centered software development has led to organizations engaging users early in the development process to help define system requirements. To facilitate user involvement in the requirements elicitation process, companies can use Group Support Systems (GSS) to conduct requirements elicitation workshops. The effectiveness of these workshops for generating a valuable set of requirements for system developers has been previously demonstrated. However, a more representative measure of progress towards a system that will meet users’ needs-- the completeness of the requirements generated by such groups has not been explored. We explore two process design considerations for increasing the completeness of requirements generated by these users: increased sharing of user stories (individual electronic brainstorming groups vs. shared user stories electronic brainstorming groups), and the use of reflective inducement prompts (unprompted vs. prompted groups). Using the Search for Ideas in Active Memory model, we predict that prompted electronic brainstorming groups will outperform any other group, including prompted, shared user stories groups at generating a more thorough set of requirements. To test the hypotheses an experiment with 56 groups consisting of 197 users was conducted. The users were asked to generate requirements for a fictitious online textbook exchange website. All hypotheses received support. The study has implications for GSS-Supported workshop design and for future research on collaborative performance in requirements elicitation

The impact of microservices: an empirical analysis of the emerging software architecture

Dissertação de mestrado em Informatics EngineeringThe applications’ development paradigm has faced changes in recent years, with modern development being characterized by the need to continuously deliver new software iterations. With great affinity with those principles, microservices is a software architecture which features characteristics that potentially promote multiple quality attributes often required by modern, large-scale applications. Its recent growth in popularity and acceptance in the industry made this architectural style often described as a form of modernizing applications that allegedly solves all the traditional monolithic applications’ inconveniences. However, there are multiple worth mentioning costs associated with its adoption, which seem to be very vaguely described in existing empirical research, being often summarized as "the complexity of a distributed system". The adoption of microservices provides the agility to achieve its promised benefits, but to actually reach them, several key implementation principles have to be honored. Given that it is still a fairly recent approach to developing applications, the lack of established principles and knowledge from development teams results in the misjudgment of both costs and values of this architectural style. The outcome is often implementations that conflict with its promised benefits. In order to implement a microservices-based architecture that achieves its alleged benefits, there are multiple patterns and methodologies involved that add a considerable amount of complexity. To evaluate its impact in a concrete and empirical way, one same e-commerce platform was developed from scratch following a monolithic architectural style and two architectural patterns based on microservices, featuring distinct inter-service communication and data management mechanisms. The effort involved in dealing with eventual consistency, maintaining a communication infrastructure, and managing data in a distributed way portrayed significant overheads not existent in the development of traditional applications. Nonetheless, migrating from a monolithic architecture to a microservicesbased is currently accepted as the modern way of developing software and this ideology is not often contested, nor the involved technical challenges are appropriately emphasized. Sometimes considered over-engineering, other times necessary, this dissertation contributes with empirical data from insights that showcase the impact of the migration to microservices in several topics. From the trade-offs associated with the use of specific patterns, the development of the functionalities in a distributed way, and the processes to assure a variety of quality attributes, to performance benchmarks experiments and the use of observability techniques, the entire development process is described and constitutes the object of study of this dissertation.O paradigma de desenvolvimento de aplicações tem visto alterações nos últimos anos, sendo o desenvolvimento moderno caracterizado pela necessidade de entrega contínua de novas iterações de software. Com grande afinidade com esses princípios, microsserviços são uma arquitetura de software que conta com características que potencialmente promovem múltiplos atributos de qualidade frequentemente requisitados por aplicações modernas de grandes dimensões. O seu recente crescimento em popularidade e aceitação na industria fez com que este estilo arquitetural se comumente descrito como uma forma de modernizar aplicações que alegadamente resolve todos os inconvenientes apresentados por aplicações monolíticas tradicionais. Contudo, existem vários custos associados à sua adoção, aparentemente descritos de forma muito vaga, frequentemente sumarizados como a "complexidade de um sistema distribuído". A adoção de microsserviços fornece a agilidade para atingir os seus benefícios prometidos, mas para os alcançar, vários princípios de implementação devem ser honrados. Dado que ainda se trata de uma forma recente de desenvolver aplicações, a falta de princípios estabelecidos e conhecimento por parte das equipas de desenvolvimento resulta em julgamentos errados dos custos e valores deste estilo arquitetural. O resultado geralmente são implementações que entram em conflito com os seus benefícios prometidos. De modo a implementar uma arquitetura baseada em microsserviços com os benefícios prometidos existem múltiplos padrões que adicionam considerável complexidade. De modo a avaliar o impacto dos microsserviços de forma concreta e empírica, foi desenvolvida uma mesma plataforma e-commerce de raiz segundo uma arquitetura monolítica e duas arquitetura baseadas em microsserviços, contando com diferentes mecanismos de comunicação entre os serviços. O esforço envolvido em lidar com consistência eventual, manter a infraestrutura de comunicação e gerir os dados de uma forma distribuída representaram desafios não existentes no desenvolvimento de aplicações tradicionais. Apesar disso, a ideologia de migração de uma arquitetura monolítica para uma baseada em microsserviços é atualmente aceite como a forma moderna de desenvolver aplicações, não sendo frequentemente contestada nem os seus desafios técnicos são apropriadamente enfatizados. Por vezes considerado overengineering, outras vezes necessário, a presente dissertação visa contribuir com dados práticos relativamente ao impacto da migração para arquiteturas baseadas em microsserviços em diversos tópicos. Desde os trade-offs envolvidos no uso de padrões específicos, o desenvolvimento das funcionalidades de uma forma distribuída e nos processos para assegurar uma variedade de atributos de qualidade, até análise de benchmarks de performance e uso de técnicas de observabilidade, todo o desenvolvimento é descrito e constitui o objeto de estudo da dissertação

Flashlight in a Dark Room: A Grounded Theory Study on Information Security Management at Small Healthcare Provider Organizations

Healthcare providers have a responsibility to protect patient’s privacy and a business motivation to properly secure their assets. These providers encounter barriers to achieving these objectives and limited academic research has been conducted to examine the causes and strategies to overcome them. A subset of this demographic, businesses with less than 10 providers, compose a majority 57% of provider organizations in the United States. This grounded theory study provides exploratory findings, discovering these small healthcare provider organizations (SHPO) have limited knowledge on information technology (IT) and information security that results in assumptions and misappropriations of information security implementation, who is responsible for security, and what the scope of security is to address organizational cyber risk. A theory conveying the interrelationship among concepts, illustrating these barriers, is visually communicated. This research can be leveraged by researchers to further understand the dimensions of the identified barriers and by practitioners to develop strategies to improve organizational information security for this demographic. The study’s findings may apply to SHPOs in other states as the criteria of South Carolina based SHPOs did not seem to influence the findings. Intensive interviewing was conducted on nine SHPOs in the state of South Carolina to elicit their thoughts and perspectives on information security at their business, how decisions are made regarding information security, how threats and risks to their business are perceived, and to understand financial activities associated with providing information security at their organization. The concepts and categories, and how they interrelate to each other compose the “flashlight in a dark room” theory. This theory claims the current IT and information security knowledge of staff responsible for information security at these SHPOs produces a narrow scope of what is required for proper information security and informs their perceived cyber risk exposure. These personnel are only “seeing” what the flashlight illuminates in a dark room full of cyber risk. They are committed to secure their organization appropriately and are confident in their current cyber security posture. This causes an organizational cyber risk reality versus perception misalignment, resulting in unknown, accepted risk exposure. SHPOs support information security and are motivated to be ‘as secure as possible’ with a strong emphasis on protecting their patient’s protected health information. This suggests if ‘the “overhead light in the dark room” could be turned on, and illuminate the scope of cyber risk, these organizations would begin to work toward implementing security controls that align to their actual cyber risk

Three Essays on Information-Securing in Organizations

This dissertation is intended to interpret, analyze, and explain the interplay between organizational structure and organizational information systems security by mapping structural contingency theory into three qualitative studies. The research motivation can be attributed in two ways. First, Johnson and Goetz\u27s (2007) conception of embedding information in organizations as part of their field research interviewing security executives serves as a methodological inspiration for the series of three studies reported here. The point that security should be infused into organization activities instead of serving as a bolted-on function is a central tenet guiding the development of this dissertation. Second, a macro approach is employed in the studies reported here, aimed at a theoretical expansion from existing behavioral security studies which typically take a micro perspective, while mitigating potential theoretical reductionism due to a predominant research concentration on individual components of organizational information security instead of the holistic function of the firm. Hence, this dissertation contributes to the behavioral organizational security research by positing a theoretical construct of information-securing, an organizational security process which is essentially characterized by dualism, dynamism, and democratism. With a macro organizational perspective on the elements of information securing, organizations can effectively discover and leverage organization-wide resources, efforts, and knowledge to cope with security contingencies. The first study of this dissertation is designed to investigate the nature of employees’ extra-role behaviors. This study investigated how employees might sometimes take steps beyond the requirements of the organizational-level security policy in order to facilitate effective workgroup operation and to assist less-skilled colleagues. The second study of this dissertation conducts an interpretive study of the role of information systems auditing in improving information security policy compliance in the workplace, with a specific focus on the role of non-malicious insiders who unknowingly or innocuously thwart corporate information security directives by engaging in unsafe computing practices. The last study of the dissertation explores the interplay between organizational structures and security activities. The organizational perspective of security bureaucracies is developed with three specific bureaucratic archetypes to define the evolutionary stages of the firm’s progress through evolving from coercive rule-based enforcement regimes to fully enabled and employee-centric security cultures in the workplace. Borrowing from Weberian metaphors, the characterization of security bureaucracies evolving from an “iron cage” to an “iron shield” is developed. These three studies revolving around the general notion of information-securing are deemed to be a promising start of a new stream of organizational IS security research. In order to enrich and extend our IS security literature, the perspective advocated in this dissertation suggests a shift in the epistemological paradigm of security behaviors in organizations from the prevailing micro views to macro perspectives which will result in very useful new perspectives on security management, security behaviors and security outcomes in organizations. GS Form 14 (8/10) APPROVAL FOR SCHOLAR

Organizational Assessment and Development Guide for Regional Associations

This publication was originally a product of The Regional Initiative, a 1992-1995special project cosponsored by the Council on Foundations and twenty-four of the nation's regional associations of grantmakers (RAGs). The purpose of the Initiative was to enhance the capacity of regional associations to meet their members' needs, by building both management and program effectiveness. The Initiative's long-term goal was to strengthen regional associations as agents of organized philanthropy in American life

Cyber physical security of avionic systems

“Cyber-physical security is a significant concern for critical infrastructures. The exponential growth of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and the strong inter-dependency between the cyber and physical components introduces integrity issues such as vulnerability to injecting malicious data and projecting fake sensor measurements. Traditional security models partition the CPS from a security perspective into just two domains: high and low. However, this absolute partition is not adequate to address the challenges in the current CPSs as they are composed of multiple overlapping partitions. Information flow properties are one of the significant classes of cyber-physical security methods that model how inputs of a system affect its outputs across the security partition. Information flow supports traceability that helps in detecting vulnerabilities and anomalous sources, as well as helps in rendering mitigation measures. To address the challenges associated with securing CPSs, two novel approaches are introduced by representing a CPS in terms of a graph structure. The first approach is an automated graph-based information flow model introduced to identify information flow paths in the avionics system and partition them into security domains. This approach is applied to selected aspects of the avionic systems to identify the vulnerabilities in case of a system failure or an attack and provide possible mitigation measures. The second approach is based on graph neural networks (GNN) to classify the graphs into different security domains. Using these two approaches, successful partitioning of the CPS into different security domains is possible in addition to identifying their optimal coverage. These approaches enable designers and engineers to ensure the integrity of the CPS. The engineers and operators can use this process during design-time and in real-time to identify failures or attacks on the system”--Abstract, page iii