Safety and Security (S&S) have the same goal, that is to maintain the integrity of human, infrastructure, hardware, software, capital and intangible assets of a system. However, literature and practice indicate that the relationship between S&S has not yet been clearly defined and their boundaries remain blurry. The current paper presents a short review of academic and professional literature about the relationship between S&S. This relationship is examined by looking at the S&S dependencies, their similarities and differences, and the role of the human element in achieving and maintaining the desired S&S levels. The review of literature showed that (1) there is a tendency to emphasize on the effects of security on safety and underestimate the opposite, (2) human factors are not part of security training to the extent are addressed in safety training, (3) security and safety problems can be the result of both internal and external disturbances and agents, (4) the intentionality or not of outcomes, and not of the action, can stand as a valid criterion to classify an event as a security or a safety one correspondingly, (5) S&S issues can result in negative implications internally and externally to the system, and (6) the synergy between S&S is of paramount importance for achieving the optimum levels of system protection. The positions of this paper might comprise a basis for enriching educational programmes around S&S and igniting relevant research.
This article explores the establishment of new commons initiatives from an integrated design perspective. Such a deeper understanding of the initial phase of becoming a commons -i.e. becommoning- and its design is crucial as members embark on a laborious, time-consuming and uncertain process in which they need to make critical design choices for their future commons. The design perspective is brought forward by the collective creation through which group values are explicated, the communal resource and its governance take shape and conditions are forged for the commons to emerge. So, the study presents the ‘becommoning’ framework as a first exploration for such a designerly approach to identify the steps and activities communities need to make at the very begin to start unfolding their initiative. The framework is applied in a case study, namely, for exploring the design of housing commons and related genres like cohousing, residential communities that are recognized as microlaboratories offering general insights for pursuing alternative societal models.
MULTIFILE
Outsourcing of business processes and information technology (IT) operations is an important trend in large and middle-sized organizations. However, outsourcing could affect the organization’s ability to align its IT with business strategy and operations. This article reports a qualitative study into the relationship between IT outsourcing (ITO) and business and IT alignment. It aims to provide recommendations for outsourcers and service providers on how outsourcing relationships should develop in order to support business and IT alignment. The research question of the study is “What is the effect of IT outsourcing on the business and IT alignment of companies that have outsourced their IT?”After a review of relevant literature and concepts, four cases are reported. The study revealed that a higher level of motivation for outsourcing paired with a higher level of the relationship between outsourcer and service provider and with a higher level of alignment maturity of the outsourcer. The study also showed that the ITO relationship is influenced by organizational turbulence on one or either side of the relationship and that the service providers tend to assess the relationship on a higher level than the outsourcers. These conclusions provide relevant directions for both outsourcers and service providers for improvement of the their relationship
