Investigating communication and security awareness within a company
The case study that we have carried out was for Royal FrieslandCampina, a Dutch dairy cooperative. In specific, we did an assignment for the ICT department of the company. The case study was split up in two parts: investigating ICT-communication within the company, and investigating the company’s level of information security awareness.
Regarding ICT-communication, the clients wanted to get insight into how employees currently get different information types and how they would like to receive/retrieve this information in the future. We further also analyzed some other ICT-communication matters, e.g. what communication channels employees find very useful, unsuitable, or are unknown to them. The advice we have given will be incorporated in the Corporate ICT Communication Plan to be written by the client, which will need to provide the ICT-department within FrieslandCampina with a clear and effective communication system.
For the other part of the case, the clients requested a measurement on the status quo of information security awareness within FrieslandCampina. This is to determine the entry level of the Information Security Awareness Program that the clients will develop. We gave advice for how to carry out such a program, supported by a quantitate analysis on the level of information security awareness. This analysis can serve to test for the effectiveness of the client’s program, when new quantitate measurements are taken later on.
The investigation has been carried out by use of a survey sent out to a random subset of the employees at FrieslandCampina. As supporting material to the survey, we have held a few interviews within different layers of the company. The interesting thing about the case is that it allowed us to broaden our skills, as it was something quite different than what we are used to in physics and mathematics. We had to look more into communication, management, and ICT, all while working within a corporate setting. We found this to be a very interesting and valuable experience, and therefore it was also good to know that the clients were very satisfied with our project!
