Teaching Information Security Management in Postgraduate Tertiary Education: The Case of Horizon Automotive Industries
This work addresses the need for effective pedagogical tools in postgraduate education for information systems and technology students, though it is incremental as it applies an existing case study method to a specific domain.
The authors tackled the challenge of teaching information security management principles by developing a case study based on a fictional firm, Horizon Automotive Industries, which experiences intellectual property theft, and used it to engage postgraduate students in critical discussions and bridge theory with practice.
Teaching cases based on stories about real organizations are a powerful means of storytelling. These cases closely parallel real-world situations and can deliver on pedagogical objectives as writers can use their creative license to craft a storyline that better focuses on the specific principles, concepts, and challenges they want to address in their teaching. The method instigates critical discussion, draws out relevant experiences from students, encourages questioning of accepted practices, and creates dialogue between theory and practice. We present Horizon, a case study of a firm that suffers a catastrophic incident of Intellectual Property (IP) theft. The case study was developed to teach information security management (ISM) principles in key areas such as strategy, risk, policy and training to postgraduate Information Systems and Information Technology students at the University of Melbourne, Australia.