Business impact visualization for information security and compliance events

Business leaders face significant challenges from IT incidents that interfere with or pose imminent risk to more than one workgroup. Communication, coordination and monitoring are hindered by factors such as the IT incidents’ technical complexity and unfamiliarity, distributed ad-hoc response teams, competing demands for their time, nuanced business dependencies, the lack of reliable IT incident measures and a piecemeal toolset to overcome these challenges. This research proposes a dynamic visual system as a solution to overcome many of these challenges. Starting with a broad outline of improving the awareness and comprehension of security and compliance events for business leaders, this effort enlisted the assistance of seven experienced IT professionals in the Des Moines metropolitan area. A user-centered design methodology was developed that enabled these individuals to influence the selection of a problem space, explore related challenges, contribute to requirements definition and prioritization, review designs and, finally, test a prototype. The group consisted of leaders and senior technical staff working in various industries. At the end of the methodology, a group of unrelated IT professionals, with no prior knowledge, of the research was asked to perform an objective evaluation of the prototype. That evaluation is reported in this document and forms the basis of conclusions regarding the research hypothesis.