What Attitude Changes Are Needed to Cause SMEs to Take a Strategic Approach to Information Security?

Spending on security in an SME usually has to compete with demands for hardware, infrastructure, and strategic applications. In this paper, the authors seek to explore the reasons why smaller SMEs in particular have consistently failed to see securing information as strategic year-on-year spending, and just regard as part of an overall tight IT budget. The authors scrutinise the typical SMEs reasoning for choosing to see non-spending on security as an acceptable strategic risk. They look particularly at possible reasons why SMEs tend not to take much notice of "scare stories" in the media based on research showing they are increasingly at risk, whilst larger businesses are taking greater precautions and become more difficult to penetrate. The results and their analysis provide useful pointers towards broader business environment changes that would cause SMEs to be more risk-averse and ethical in their approach to securing their own and their clients’ information.

Using Information, Metrics and Developing Business Cases for L&D

The second theme of this book concerns L&D’s ‘Contributions’, specifically how L&D professionals articulate, communicate and demonstrate value that it brings to the organization. Specifically, Chapter 3, titled ‘Using information, metrics and developing business cases for L&D’, discusses how L&D professionals can do this using the business case as a vehicle. The business case is a tool that L&D professionals can use to show how new L&D initiatives can benefit the organization and its stakeholders. The value of such benefit can be ‘articulated’ quantitatively and qualitatively. Chapter 3 adopts a holistic approach in developing a business case. L&D professionals must be competently knowledgeable about accounting and finance but without the need to be experts – as their expertise lies in L&D. Therefore to successfully complete a business case, L&D professionals need to form teams comprising the right members (depending on what the business case is about). The political realities that are associated with the development of a business case can be important considerations. How well L&D is able to ‘sell’ a business case depends on how well it is framed, usually either as a problem or opportunity. We then discuss the information, data and metrics required to build a typical business case, specifically in terms of identifying the benefits and costs. The chapter concludes with some suggestions on how the findings from the business case can be presented in infographics-inspired form.

Wasta in the Jordanian Culture: a Study in the Banking Sector

Due to globalisation, the emergence and expansion of new overseas markets, extensive use of information and communication technologies in global trade and growing competition between multinational companies, international Human Resource Management (HRM) is an increasingly attractive and popular area of study. However, much of our knowledge is built on an Anglo-Saxon/ European base and there is a paucity of research that considers the transfer of modern (western) principles of HRM to developing countries, particularly in the Middle East. Arguably, Jordan is one country that may benefit from the promise of quality, equality and profitability offered by the systemic approach to managing people. Thus, this paper introduces a PhD research project, currently in its first year, that considers the transfer of western recruitment and selection frameworks into Jordanian culture.