Edward A. Stohr - Böcker

Guarding Your Business outlines the organizational elements that must be in place to protect the information and physical assets of typical businesses and organizations. The book recognizes the need for an architecture integrated within the organizational environment for systematic protection. Such an architecture is offered along with the building blocks to make organizations resistant to human error and resilient under physical attack or natural disaster. The book addresses risk assessment, determination of quality-of-service levels that balance safety versus cost, security versus privacy, determination of access rights to data and software, and a security-conscious culture in the organization. Questions answered by experts from academia and industry include: How can one organize for security? What organizational structures, policies, and procedures must be in place? What legal and privacy issues must be addressed?

The need for enterprise flexibility in an era of rapidly advancing technology, increasing competition, and globalization, is apparent. Flexibility can be thought of as an ability of the enterprise to quickly and efficiently respond to market changes and to bring new products and services quickly to the market place. Beyond this definition, a truly flexible enterprise should proactively change the market through its ability to create new and innovative products and services. The proposed book is intended to provide a conceptual framework of ‘Flexible Enterprise’ supported by researches/case applications in various types of flexibilities exhibited by a flexible enterprise. The selected papers from a variety of issues concerning the planning and operation of a flexible enterprise are organized into following four parts:I Enterprise and Strategic FlexibilityII Organizational FlexibilityIII Business Process and Information Systems FlexibilityIV Operations Flexibility