Abstract

The digital economy is hard to imagine without ubiquitous network access. Discussions tend to highlight commercial prospects, such as electronic business, but proliferation of network access has also enabled potentially threatening activities. Threats, such as break-ins and malicious code, are receiving considerable attention. Potential impacts of virtually unrestricted information distribution, however, are just beginning to receive scientific attention. From a corporate perspective, potentially threatening information is not limited to hoaxes, rumours and purposely false information but may also include “true” information potentially having negative impacts on the business situation. Companies need to be aware of such potentially threatening activities. Elsewhere we have discussed what distinguishes these information-level threats from network-level threats, such as break-ins and malicious code, and we have outlined why information-level threats may be hard to detect. We have proposed “corporate awareness” as an approach allowing corporations to prepare for the increasing importance of threatening online activities. In this paper, we focus on practical aspects of corporate awareness and discuss how information systems can be used to enable corporate awareness. In particular, we sketch requirements for online activities information systems and discuss to what extent these requirements are met by collaborative software systems, such as LiveNet.

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