It was late on a Friday afternoon. The ReliaQuest Security Operations Center was busy as usual, but nothing was out of the ordinary. ReliaQuest Chief Technology Officer, Joe Partlow, was in his office working on a new technology innovation when his cell phone rang. It was the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for ABC Company, one of ReliaQuest’s clients–a company with millions of customers ...

ABC Insurance was a leading short-term insurer in South Africa. The FSB (Financial Services Board) of South Africa defined short term insurance cover as indemnification secured by the insurance purchaser over their fixed and movable assets (FSB, n.d.). Such insurable assets could be one’s home (the actual building) or motor vehicle (https://www.fsb.co.za). The purchased insurance cover protected t ...

Ricardo Lasa, CEO and co-founder of SiteWit Corporation, was always chastising his technical team that the “biggest risk facing the company is the engine.” SiteWit provided cross-platform services aimed at helping small (or even medium-sized) business customers effectively advertise on search engines like Google (AdWords) and Bing (adCenter), as well as other online social networking or display ad ...

Dr. Leonid Perlovsky, distinguished physicist and cognitive scientist, pondered this question, which could have a significant impact on his research direction in the years to come. Over the past few decades, he had developed and refined algorithms for distinguishing objects in images, an approach that had found its way into various classified U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) applications. Now he w ...

Dr. T. Grandon Gill, a Professor in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department at the University of South Florida, was traveling with his family in England when he received a strange phone message. Not being able to respond, he ignored it until—a couple of days later—he was notified that access to his personal website had been suspended (see Exhibit 1). Grandon.com had, once again, b ...

Joseph Bromer, Head of IT Solutions Delivery at LifeInsure Emerging Markets, deliberated on a challenge that he had just been given. TIBCO, a vendor supporting ObjectStar, notified LifeInsure that support for the application would cease at the end of 2017. ObjectStar was the Product Administration System (PAS) system used by LifeInsure. The ObjectStar platform was called Alpha and was used in over ...

After 28 years of public service, the Information Technology Bureau Chief for the Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD), Dr. Steven Dicks, was still passionate about serving the public. By first focusing on the needs of people in the District, Dr. Dicks was able to objectively observe the many aspects of operations for which he was responsible. His observations led him to believe th ...

Josef Langerman, Head of IT Transformation for Standard Bank, reflected on the extraordinary transformation that his organization’s IT group had recently experienced. Over the past three years, Standard Bank’s IT group had changed from the relatively well accepted systems development lifecycle/waterfall model to a revolutionary large scale agile approach. The results had been gratifying. But it le ...

Grandon Gill, Academic Director of the Doctorate of Business Administration Program (DBA) at the University of South Florida’s (USF) Muma College of Business pondered the email he had just sent to Moez Limayem, the dean of the college (see Exhibit 1). In that email, he had raised the possibility of developing a version of the college’s highly successful DBA program specifically targeting cybersecu ...

Mark Dumas, a Systems Specialist at a Telecommunications Company located in South Africa needed to make decisions regarding the current virtualized infrastructure platform. These decisions also involved the renewal of hardware that had reached the end of its maintenance period and the latest virtualization platform software. Dumas further needed to formulate a plan to ensure that there was enough ...

Determining how a corporate real estate organization estimates its project costs is a big decision that impacts budgets, customers, and the bottom line. Our next management meeting is only a few days away. What recommendations should we make for improvement of cost estimating? Troy Montgomery, a consultant at Humana in April of 2015, was tasked with providing leaders of Humana’s corporate real ...

This case, based on actual events that took place in mobile industry, describes a complex decision about product priority and sales training in a complex landscape. Rob Hammond, product executive at Syniverse Technologies, needed to decide whether to grow revenues by focusing the sales force on selling an existing product, SMS Application to Peer Text Messaging, in new markets or investing in the ...