In the current business environment, many organizations use popular standards such as the ISO 27000x series, COBIT, and related frameworks to protect themselves against security incidents. However, these standards and frameworks are overly complicated for small to medium-sized enterprises, leaving these organizations with no easy to understand toolkit to address their security needs. This research builds upon the recent Information Security Focus Area Maturity (ISFAM) model for SME information security as a cornerstone in the development of an assessment tool for tailormade, fast, and easy-to-use information security advice for SMEs. By performing an extensive literature review and evaluating the results with security experts, we propose the Characterizing Organizations' Information Security for SMEs (CHOISS) model to relate measurable organizational characteristics in four categories through 47 parameters to help SMEs distinguish and prioritize which risks to mitigate.
Abstract. The generalized use of the Internet and social network platforms has changed the way human beings establish relations, collaborate and share resources. In this context, crowdsourcing (or crowd computing) is becoming a common solution to provide answers to complex problems by automatically coordinating the potential of machines and human beings working together. Several challenges still separate crowdsourcing from its generalized acceptance by industry. For instance, the quality delivered by the workers in the crowd is crucial and depends on different aspects such as their skills, experience, commitment, etc. Trusting the individuals in a social network and their capacity to carry out the different tasks assigned to them becomes essential in speeding up the adoption of this new technology in industrial environments. Capacity to deliver on time, cost or confidentiality are just some other possible obstacles to be removed. In this paper, we discuss some of these issues, provide solutions to improve the quality in systems based on the use of crowdsourcing and present a real industrial problem where we use the crowd to leverage the work capacity of geographically distributed human beings.
Product managers play a pivotal role in maximizing value for software companies. To assist product managers in their activities the Software Product Management (SPM) Maturity Matrix has been created that enables product managers to benchmark their organization, assess individual processes and apply best practices to create an effective SPM environment. Although a number of case studies and expert evaluations have been performed, a large scale quantitative analysis has not yet been conducted to evaluate this instrument. This research evaluates and improves the SPM Maturity Matrix based on 62 case studies. The cases were analyzed to uncover anomalies: blocking questions, blocking levels, and undifferentiating questions. The anomalies were then discussed in a workgroup with experts which resulted in suggested improvements to address the anomalies. The suggestions of the workgroup will be used to improve the SPM Maturity Matrix. As an additional result, the case studies also provide valuable insight into the maturity of software companies in industry.
This paper assesses the power capacity overload problem caused by new energy techniques on a large portion of the Alliander power distribution grid. Over 15,000 km of power cables and 7,000 transformers have been evaluated as part of this study. Many data sources have been combined to construct several detailed energy scenarios for predicting the energy demand in 2030. These scenarios have been converted into power load time series with a 15 minute interval. Using these detailed load profiles various emergent energy management techniques, such as power storage and load control, have been assessed for their reducing the impact of peak loads. In the worst case scenario in 2030 only 6% of the total number of transformers is overloaded. While the energy management techniques can significantly reduce these overload problems, the financial benefits of applying these techniques to reduce overload problems the next decade are limited.
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