When Spheres Collide: A Refocused Research Framework for Personal Use of Technology at Work

Continued advancements in technology and more flexible work arrangements have caused employees’ personal and work spheres to collide, increasing the prevalence of the personal use of technology at work. This collision of often competing priorities presents dilemmas for employees in determining how best to manage tasks throughout the day. Prior conceptualizations of “cyberloafing”, “cyberslacking”, “personal web use,” etc. from prior research classify the behavior as unnecessarily negative and often include non-essential constraints. In this paper, we offer an updated definition and refocused research framework that uses novel insights drawn from the multitasking literature to guide researchers in addressing a central question: how can employees most effectively manage their personal use of technology at work? We address various topics and offer research questions to properly align research and practice while re-initiating further investigations into this interesting phenomenon

Understanding, Defining and Managing of Operational Personal Priorities. A Tool for Task Management Self-Prioritization

RÉSUMÉ : Plusieurs personnes se sentent bombardées par l'augmentation de la charge de travail et des engagements. Nous avons, souvent, le sentiment de manquer de temps. L'établissement des priorités devient un défi et émotionnel pour tout le monde. En effet, il est difficile de définir les tâches qui semblent plus le meilleur parmi plusieurs choix. Il existe des centaines d'outils numériques de gestion de temps personnel sur le marché. Cependant, il semble avoir une faible tentative de développer un outil qui s’aligne avec le comportement des gens et qui réponde à leurs besoins. Le temps est élastique et sa gestion est difficile par des gens. Par conséquent, chaque personne reste son meilleur planificateur. Cette recherche vise à répondre à l’objectif : « Comment pouvons-nous soutenir les gens dans la gestion, sélection et priorisation de leurs propres tâches connues / inconnues afin de donner le meilleur de soi-même ? ». Pour atteindre cet objectif, les besoins des gens ont été étudiés afin de comprendre comment ils gèrent leurs tâches. Les données ont servi à cerner leurs difficultés dans la gestion, puis à élaborer un cadre pour répondre à leurs besoins. L'étude empirique a été réalisée sur le personnel du département d'urgence d’un hôpital. Le choix du département d’urgence a été fait vu l’importance de la gestion du temps et des priorités. Sur la base des résultats de l'étude de cas, un nouvel outil a été proposé, appelé " House in Goal Hierarchy (HIGH) ", qui est un outil d'établissement des priorités et de prise de décision utilisant une approche ascendante de gestion. Le potentiel de ce nouvel outil a été testé auprès de quinze personnes de l'École Polytechnique de Montréal. Un sondage a été mené pour comprendre l'efficacité et les différences de comportement des participants avant et après l’utilisation de l’outil. Les données collectées ont été analysées qualitativement et quantitativement. Malgré cette recherche avait la limite de taille de l’échantillon, une amélioration de 50% a été mesurée auprès des utilisateurs dans leur priorisation de tâches et dans l’atteinte de leurs objectifs.----------ABSTRACT : Many of us feel bombarded by our increasing workload, commitments, and requests for more time. Prioritization is very emotional and challenging for everyone since it is difficult to prioritize, which is the best among more than one choice. There are hundreds of digital and paper versions of personal time management tools available on the market. It seems there is a feeble attempt to develop a tool that meets people' behavior and needs. Time is elastic and more or less manageable by people. Therefore, each person is his/her own best scheduler. Time-management more referred to the self and task management to make a balance between the activities. This research tried to work on the objective of “How can we help people to manage, select and prioritize their own known/unknown tasks to account to themselves in a respectful manner?” For this objective, people’s needs were studied to understand how people manage tasks. The data was used to identify their difficulties and then develop a framework to meet their needs. The empirical study was carried out on the personnel of the emergency department of the hospital since time and prioritizing is extremely valuable to them. Based on the results of the case study, a new tool was proposed called “House in Goal Hierarchy (HIGH)” that is a prioritizing and decision-making tool to create a bottom-up approach. The potential of this new tool was then tested with fifteen graduate students of the École Polytechnique of Montréal. A survey was applied to understand the effectiveness and differences in the behavior of the participants, before and after using the tool. The collected data analyzed in both quantitative and qualitative ways. Even though this research had a limitation in testing in a small group, but stillthe result of using HIGH tool showed that the approach has approximately a 50% improvement in prioritizing the user’s tasks and reaching his/her goals

Incident Prioritisation for Intrusion Response Systems

The landscape of security threats continues to evolve, with attacks becoming more serious and the number of vulnerabilities rising. To manage these threats, many security studies have been undertaken in recent years, mainly focusing on improving detection, prevention and response efficiency. Although there are security tools such as antivirus software and firewalls available to counter them, Intrusion Detection Systems and similar tools such as Intrusion Prevention Systems are still one of the most popular approaches. There are hundreds of published works related to intrusion detection that aim to increase the efficiency and reliability of detection, prevention and response systems. Whilst intrusion detection system technologies have advanced, there are still areas available to explore, particularly with respect to the process of selecting appropriate responses. Supporting a variety of response options, such as proactive, reactive and passive responses, enables security analysts to select the most appropriate response in different contexts. In view of that, a methodical approach that identifies important incidents as opposed to trivial ones is first needed. However, with thousands of incidents identified every day, relying upon manual processes to identify their importance and urgency is complicated, difficult, error-prone and time-consuming, and so prioritising them automatically would help security analysts to focus only on the most critical ones. The existing approaches to incident prioritisation provide various ways to prioritise incidents, but less attention has been given to adopting them into an automated response system. Although some studies have realised the advantages of prioritisation, they released no further studies showing they had continued to investigate the effectiveness of the process. This study concerns enhancing the incident prioritisation scheme to identify critical incidents based upon their criticality and urgency, in order to facilitate an autonomous mode for the response selection process in Intrusion Response Systems. To achieve this aim, this study proposed a novel framework which combines models and strategies identified from the comprehensive literature review. A model to estimate the level of risks of incidents is established, named the Risk Index Model (RIM). With different levels of risk, the Response Strategy Model (RSM) dynamically maps incidents into different types of response, with serious incidents being mapped to active responses in order to minimise their impact, while incidents with less impact have passive responses. The combination of these models provides a seamless way to map incidents automatically; however, it needs to be evaluated in terms of its effectiveness and performances. To demonstrate the results, an evaluation study with four stages was undertaken; these stages were a feasibility study of the RIM, comparison studies with industrial standards such as Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System (CVSS) and Snort, an examination of the effect of different strategies in the rating and ranking process, and a test of the effectiveness and performance of the Response Strategy Model (RSM). With promising results being gathered, a proof-of-concept study was conducted to demonstrate the framework using a live traffic network simulation with online assessment mode via the Security Incident Prioritisation Module (SIPM); this study was used to investigate its effectiveness and practicality. Through the results gathered, this study has demonstrated that the prioritisation process can feasibly be used to facilitate the response selection process in Intrusion Response Systems. The main contribution of this study is to have proposed, designed, evaluated and simulated a framework to support the incident prioritisation process for Intrusion Response Systems.Ministry of Higher Education in Malaysia and University of Malay

Tietotekniikan kehitysprojekti eräässä tutkimusorganisaatiossa

Organisaatioiden käyttämä informaatioteknologia (IT) on työntekijöiden tuottavuuden kannalta kriittinen tekijä erityisesti tutkimustyössä, joka on hyvin riippuvainen IT -infrastruktuurin toimivuudesta. Tämä diplomityö kuvaa IT -kehitysprojektin, joka toteutettiin Lääketieteellisen tekniikan ja laskennallisen tieteen laitoksella Aalto-yliopiston teknillisessä korkeakoulussa. Tutkimuksessa käytettiin toimintatutkimus-menetelmää, joka yhdistää tutkimuksen ja organisaation kehityksen käytännön ongelmatilanteessa. Tutkimuksen alussa IT -ympäristön ongelma-alueet kartoitettiin kyselyllä ja käyttäjähaastatteluilla. Organisaatiossa ilmeni useita kehitysalueita, ja toteutettavat parannustoimenpiteet priorisoitiin käyttäjien tarpeiden perusteella. Tutkimuksen laajuuden rajaamiseksi vain tärkeimmät parannustoimenpiteet valittiin toteutettavaksi tässä tutkimuksissa. Tärkeimmät toteutetut toimenpiteet tutkimuksen aikana olivat IT -palveluportfolion luominen, Linux-työasemien päivittäminen ja lähiverkon rakenteen uudistaminen. Linux-työasemien päivittämiseen kuului sopivan Linux-jakelun sekä konfiguraationhallintatyökalun valitseminen. Muita toteutettuja toimenpiteitä olivat sähköpostipalvelun siirtäminen yliopiston keskitetylle IT -organisaatiolle sekä tulostimien ja skannereiden luotettavuuden parantaminen. Toimenpiteiden vaikutusta arvioitiin toisessa kyselyssä, joka osoitti käyttäjien tyytyväisyyden parantuneen tilastollisesti merkittävästi Linux-työasemien, sähköpostipalveluiden ja IT -tuen vasteaikojen osalta. Tutkimuksen luotettavuutta arvioitiin sekä tilastollisen päättelyn että toimintatutkimuksen kriteereiden perusteella. Työssä pohditaan myös tulosten siirrettävyyttä muihin samankaltaisiin lähtötilanteisiin.An IT -environment of an organization is a critical element for the productivity of the employees, especially in research work which is very dependent on IT -infrastructure. This Master's Thesis presents an IT improvement project that was carried out at the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science (BECS) at Aalto University School of Science and Technology. The project was carried out using Action Research -methodology, that combines the goals of conducting scientific research and improving subjects in a practical situation. The improvement areas were investigated using a survey and user interviews. Several development areas were identified and improvement actions to solve the problems were prioritized according to the user needs. Major improvements implemented during the project include an IT service portfolio for managing the IT services, upgrading the Linux-workstations and renewing the structure of the network. Upgrading the Linux-workstations also included selecting a suitable Linux distribution and a tool for centralized configuration management. Other improvement actions include migrating the email service to a centralized system and improving printer and scanner reliability. The results of the actions were evaluated in a follow-up survey, which showed statistically significant increases in user satisfaction for Linux-workstations, email services and response times for IT -support. The validity of the research is analyzed according to both statistical and Action Research criteria. Also the transferability of the results to other similar situations is discussed

Improving Tool Support for Personal Task Management (PTM)

Personal Task Management (PTM) describes the planning, prioritising and list-making of tasks employed by an individual user. There are hundreds of commercial electronic PTM tools available on the market which users can choose from. There appears to be little attempt to develop a framework for describing people’s task management behaviour, making it difficult to determine the extent to which these tools meet users’ needs. The aims of this thesis were therefore to understand how academics manage their tasks, to identify the conceptual gaps between them and the existing electronic tools, and to establish requirements for guiding the design and evaluation of PTM tools. The research adopts a user-centred design methodology. This includes both empirical and analytical approaches, conducted through four different studies. Firstly, a semi-structured interview study develops a PTM framework, describing the components of PTM (i.e. the underlying activities and contextual factors). Secondly, a member-checking study tests the accuracy of the framework. Thirdly, a video-diary study examines the inconsistencies discovered between the interview and member-checking studies. The findings extend the PTM framework to include other aspects of users (e.g. challenges, context awareness, etc.), broadening the understanding of the complexity of PTM behaviours. The data gathered in the user studies was analysed using a grounded theory (GT) approach, and the findings were then used to build personas of academics. Finally, an in-depth expert analytical evaluation of a set of existing tools using CASSM identifies the conceptual misfits between users and the existing tools. The contributions of this thesis are a development of the PTM framework, describing the key factors that influence academics in managing their tasks; a development of personas, explaining characteristics of different groups of academics and PTM strategies that they employ over time; and an evaluation of existing PTM tools, determining their strengths and limitations and providing recommendations