Project Commitment in the Context of Information Security

Brief Organizational Information Security Background

Although a number of IS security approaches have been developed over the years that reactively minimize security threats such as checklists, risk analysis and evaluation methods, there is a need to establish mechanisms to proactively manage IS security. That said, academics’ and practitioners’ interest has turned on social and organizational factors that may have an influence on IS security development and management. For example, Orlikowski and Gash (1994) have emphasized the importance of understanding the assumptions and values of different stakeholders to successful IS implementation. Such values have also been considered important in organizational change (Simpson & Wilson, 1999), in security planning (Straub & Welke, 1998) and in identifying the values of internet commerce to customers (Keeney, 1999).

Dhillon and Torkzadeh (2006) have also used the value-focused thinking approach to identify fundamental and mean objectives, as opposed to goals, that would be a basis for developing IS security measures. These value-focused objectives were more of the organizational and contextual type.