Insights

Many cyber security specialists or security software sales representatives want to convince people to act or buy certain products by frightening them with statements like: “If you don’t do (or buy) this, you will be hacked.” Sadly, this way of communicating is still an often-used approach in Information Security to get the message across or motivate people to “buy” their products or service. We call this the FUD approach. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt and was introduced in the late eighties. As of 1991, the expression became fashionable for any form of disinformation used against the competition. FUD is a simple but effective strategy that supplies the audience with negative, fake, or false information to influence their behavior and decisions. FUD is so effective because adverse events have a more significant impact on our brain and associated attitudes than positive ones. In psychology, this is called negative bias. Negative bias can have an effect on behavior as well as your decisions. This is also why the news often spreads negative news because negative news draws greater attention and therefore sells.

Although this might be effective in the short term to get things done, this won’t be a very successful approach in the long term. In this blog I'd like to explain you why.

The use of data is becoming more and more pervasive in our private lives, yet the incorporation of data in HR takes off on a very slow pace. Only one in five companies in Europe has people analytics projects. Why does it seem to take so much longer for analytics to conquer the work context compared to our private lives?

In 2020, Yves Vanderbeken graduated from the Executive Master in IT Governance and Assurance (aka MITGA). His research is still a burning topic in our society: how to find and select the right citizen services from the government to help us? And how could online service platforms improve these citizen services? In this blog, he shares some of his most recent findings.

"Two feet on the ground, getting people moving. Not waiting for the mandate. Daring to look in the mirror every day. Not the leadership but the effect."

These are some testimonies about leadership from the participants of the AMS Masterclass Leadership for the public and social profit sector. Throughout the course, they took the step from "socialized" to "self-authoring": from using social leadership benchmarks to developing their own definition about what is needed and appropriate. A crucial step toward the leaders the public sector needs to properly address today's many challenges.

In essence, a career is the pattern of work-related experiences a person has during his professional life. It is a complex mosaic of objective situations and events and their subjective interpretations. In short, the work we do every day and how that makes us feel. This turns a career into an individual and highly complex matter.

The theme of 'employee participation' is more topical today than ever in management discourse. Organizations are becoming flatter, hierarchical bureaucracies are being phased out, leadership is being more 'shared' and included outside the hierarchy. This also creates expectations towards employees: they need to make their voices heard more and more. Employee participation is thus no longer something purely 'desired', but rather something that is 'required' (Knoll et al., 2016).

In this white paper (in Dutch) we outline the results and analysis, based on a survey of 1598 employees.

Due to the unpredictable and rapidly changing context, a flexible labor market is more important today than ever. For example, the corona crisis has shown that flexibility was needed to keep employees employed and organizations running. Our employer surveys show that in just about one in five organizations, employees were hired in other departments.

Over the last seven years, the role of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has gained significant importance within local governments, because local governments that want to be in line with the Baseline Information Security Government urgently need such a CISO. About 50% of the job vacancies on LinkedIn are meant for local governments. But the role of CISO has drastically changed in recent years. The latest figures indicate that an astonishing 22% of the IT budget is allocated to cyber and information security. Our own experience is that dialogues with C-level executives nowadays revolve around questions such as: Are we doing the right thing, and are we doing this right? How do we measure and monitor our return on security investments (ROSI)? And where do we get the ‘biggest bang for the buck’?

Organizations today must look for talent in a tight labor market. In June 2021, the VDAB received a record number of job openings: 33,760. That's more than twice as many as in June 2020 and 2019. The increase is greatest for jobs with experience, permanent contracts and highly skilled workers. With the outflow of a large generation of baby boomers, tightness in the labor market will only increase in the coming years. At the same time, in the first half of this year, more than 60,000 start-ups are already taking the plunge into entrepreneurship. A quarter more than last year, despite the corona crisis and despite all the corona restrictions that were also in effect for much of 2021. A significant number of those startups are freelancers.