Information Security: An Organizational Change Perspective

This research examines changing information security requirements and the strategies organizations are developing to meet the related challenges. This is a topic of considerable importance because organizations must simultaneously provide information to their employees, customers, and business partners while safeguarding it from inappropriate access, use, and disclosure. Sharing information through the Internet is now a prevailing practice (Panda, 1999) with security breaches affecting 90% of all businesses each year and costing some $17 billion (Austin & Darby, 2003). To investigate how organizations are changing in response to new information security requirements, this paper develops a theoretical framework, validates the framework, proposes a set of interesting research questions for further study, and concludes with a suggested methodology.