Just-in-Time Awareness Training and Behavioral Analytics

The article that I read is "Behavioral Analytics: The future of Just-in-Time Awareness Training?" Just-in-time awareness training is a new method of training employees through the use of behavioral analytics. Behavioral analytics seeks to gather information on the actions of employees to assign a probability of risk which an employee poses to an organization While this recent trend of data usage is able to identify the risky employees, it can also be used to, through training, target specific areas for improvement. Recently organizations have begun to monitor the behaviors of their employees. When the system observes a risky behavior by an employee, it will prompt the employee to immediately begin watching a training video on their mistakes. One example given is when an employee compromises data, either accidentally or purposefully, into a public cloud server such as Google Drive; the system will then halt the system and pop up a 20-second video for the employee to watch. If the offense continues, a second video will show that is 5-minutes while the third will be 30 minutes. The videos get exponentially longer with each subsequent violation. This almost adaptive negative reinforcement along with data analytics will start to become a major trend within organizations in the near future.

This topic relates to class because as organizations begin to implement this new method of training, it will not only be used to train IT professionals, but also operations staff. As we are aware, there has always been an antagonistic relationship between those in operations and those in security; one aims at achieving efficiency while the other is security. If this method were to be implemented for those who work in operations, however, employees would be stopped on the job for possibly inconsequential mistakes. This would increase tact time and the production cycle because if employees who are working on building a car needs to keep stopping their work to watch videos, it makes it extremely hard to be productive or for operations managers to plan the cycle time and the critical path.

This new method of training and behavioral analytics is important for MIS professionals to know because MIS professionals are the link between operations and IT. As a result, they must be able to effectively understand both the viewpoints of these departments and be able to properly translate these departments’ unique language to the other. Furthermore, within organizations systems analysts are segregated from the actual usage of their developed applications. As a result, system analysts, which is a role that many MIS professionals go into, need to be able to distill down a system to only the required components and adding only the security that is deemed to be necessary to achieve the optimal efficiency.