Creativity in organizations is the process by which new ideas that make innovation possible are developed. It is the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others.†(Franken, 1994). It is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Thus, creativity involves two processes i.e. thinking then producing. Creativity depends on flow and exchange of ideas and information such as computer networks as well as knowledge representation that aims at providing flexible communication which is a tool for creative thinkers in an organization. Recent reports from the UNCTAD indicate that the Creative Economy is undergoing unprecedented growth compared with traditional services and manufacturing. Use of technology to support the management of information and knowledge has benefited many but due to globalization there has been the wake of the digital security threats.
Creativity in management and organisational aspects is important particularly to ameliorate the many digital security threats and attacks that arises due to globalization and needs urgent and immediate response. Therefore the best way in which the digital security threats can be minimised is through taking into consideration the importance and role of creativity in organizations management and development. Thus, there should be an established conceptual foundation about creativity and organisations.
Digital technology provides many benefits to organizations i.e.business process improvement, reduce enterprise costs, increase the use of information analytics, enhance the enterprise workforce effectiveness and attract and retain new customers, also helps in managing change initiatives, creating new products or services, targeting customers and markets more effectively, consolidating business operations and finally expanding the current customer relationships.
Introduction
Creativity can be used to enhance digital security technologies .Organisational responsiveness connotes the ability of organisations to respond to its external environment in ways that can be termed appropriate as emergency management, a process that deals with organisations ability to nullify negative threats and build on positive opportunities. It is to be noted that for every organisation to be successful in the fight against these threats, it need to first identify them and come up with a strategy on how to handle them.An example, It has become apparent that creativity has a major influence in response to digital security threats. in the year 2008 the Georgia Tech information security centre in England hosted a summit to discuss on digital threats and how to overcome these challenges (Yang, Lu, 2005). It was therefore decided that the way forward is through proactive and collaborative loom to understanding these threats.
Another important thing to guide us is the history of cyber attacks that were witnessed in Russia and Georgia for it happened out of some plan by the Russian government so as to block data cables passing through Moscow to Georgia.Under the influence of the perspective social psychology, research into creativity should focus more on the creativity of ordinary people and in particular within organisations. Â Â Knights (2005) pointed out a distinction of creativity within the technological field which had represented the archetype of the subsequent classification and mainstreams of creativity for three decades.
The threats of today’s highly changing digital security environment, both for private and public sector can be successful by adopting creativity to a higher level.
Research question;
Can creativity be a necessary tool to curb the digital security threats
Hypothesis
Creativity can enhance a reduction to digital security threats in organizations
Justification of the study
Changes in technology necessitate a responsiveness of organisations creativity to stay up to speed nullifying negative threats and building on the positive opportunity. Bray et al (2007) examined organisational responsiveness in the context that inter individual knowledge exchanges, influence the ability of an organisation to respond in an appropriate manner to changing an environment. They are of the view that, presence of the exchanges guarantees the ability of an organisation’s responsiveness in the positive direction.
Conger, et al (2006), proposes that, the issue of creativity in the fight against digital threats can be clearly illustrated through the way the organisations use measures like penetration testing. Whereby they periodically break into their system so as to exercise contingency and see the response.
Digital attacks are such that the attacker looks for the weakest link, a loophole to attack the organisations. (Lu, Vakil, 2005). In United Kingdom, creativity has been a very big boost towards prevention of digital attacks. For example counteracting known threats and detecting abuse of the system.
Significance of the study
Continual technological changes necessitate a responsiveness of organizations creativity to stay up to speed nullifying negative threats and building on the positive opportunity. Bray et al (2007) examined organizational responsiveness in the context that inter individual knowledge exchanges, influence the ability of an organization to respond in an appropriate manner to changing an environment. They are of the view that presence of the exchanges guarantees the ability of an organization’s responsiveness in the positive direction.
Jacob (2003) proposes that responsiveness as a socially constructed attribute refers to the perceptual, reflective and adaptive dimension of an organization. According to him, organisations responsiveness provides a lens to reflect on the strategy and organizational development. Also social construction provides the platform on which responses are developed in unison.
Hence, organisations responses to digital threats involve individuals taking practical steps in learning the organizations structures and policies and developing strategies in increasing the organization’s adaptively.
Literature review
Digital attacks are such that the attacker looks for the weakest link, a loophole to attack the organisation. According to Baskerville and Harpee (1998), action research is ideal for studying information system methods in a practical setting because it expands scientific knowledge and helps organisations to solve concrete problems with long term implications. It is to be noted that action research is a form of field intervention driven by a problem in an organisation; it is an empirical method that is interventional, qualitative, interpretive and clinical (Mumtord, 2001).
This type of creativity is what might be called “everyday or ordinary creativity†rather than “extraordinary creativityâ€, which is regarded as the kind of creativity necessary to deal with totally unexpected events. Extraordinary creativity involves the production of new knowledge which has a major impact on an existing area of knowledge, the boundaries of which are monitored by managers and experts within that field.
Ordinary creativity, on the other end, is necessary when the particular characteristics of the occurred event are not foreseeable, but within boundaries of the organisational structure or economic activity, effective in containing digital security attacks. Ordinary creative thinking is proposed as a point of view in which creativity results from ordinary people thinking in identifiably unique ways when they meet everyday problems in real-life situations.
Management and organisational responses with emphasis on digital security, focuses on the ordinary creativity, rather than the extraordinary and there is a basic assumption: that the ordinary person can be creative (Seltzer and Bentley, 1999 & Weisberg, 1993). A challenge posed by the conceptualising of ordinary creativity alongside extraordinary creativity, is the relationship they bear to one another. Some researchers had argued for a continuum of creativity, with “localised†creativity somewhere in the middle, between extraordinary creativity and ordinary creativity. Investigating further into the “middle†creativity would lead us to an extent that is beyond the scope of present paper, thus it should be regarded at, as an interesting ramification of analysis about creativity.
The digital securityissues involve; fraud  which is the most common attack to any organisation, since the early economy merchants were trying to use rigged scales, when gold and money were counterfeited, currency etc. Modern global financial system and institutions all rely on digital bits and experience every year losses worth billions of Euros. No matter how the cost of frauds is insured, customers would pay within their commissions the cost of those losses and insurances. Digital frauds are “distorting†in the economy, making commissions and thus electronic commerce more expensive.
Intellectual property theft is an attack that could be against books, magazines, videos, music etc, all in digital format, but could also target trade data, transactions, company commercial secrets, databases etc. These problems can be viewed from two different dimensions; how to keep some data private while avoiding data spilling and/or dissemination of reserved information, and maintaining control and receiving appropriate compensation for proprietary data while making it public.
Identity theftis a growing kind of attack which raises concern for both governmental and private sectors. As more identities go digital and identity recognition goes electronic, identity theft becomes easier. Impacts may vary ranging from civil transportation to business start up and transactions to money laundering and the financial sector.
Data Corruption is one of the most dangerous digital threats to organisations is data corruption. Having large live databases and sensitive information undetectably corrupted. For instance changing all the “800†numbers or part of numbers present in the DB into “154†within accounting files would put the entire organisation at risk. This kind of attack is dangerous and is mostly associated to an insider with access to the database. Research shows that digital security is the responsibility of organizations and companies to manage their information systems (Cheung, 2005, Culnan & Armstrong, 1999, Smith et al., 1996). These views are all corporate-centric because threats have expanded beyond the organization to its data-sharing partners, springing in large data aggregation and the sale of those which are largely unregulated and uncontrolled (Conger, 2006).
Network attacks are completely dependent on internet channels. These threats have the ability to slow down network performance, disrupt online services and degrade performances of online applications. In year 2000 it was estimated that attacks on Yahoo, eBay, CNN and others caused losses estimated to an excess of $100 million (Austin, 2003). The most dangerous implication of these attack would be the tampering or the defacing of company’s web site without making it noticeable, redirecting or shadowing access data, credentials (passwords, MAC addresses, digital Ids, certificates), transactions and traffic to an unauthorised third party. Once gathered and offline, data can be analysed, cracked, cloned and/or tampered with resulting in a tremendous security breach and putting systems at a high risk. The most threatening aspect of such attacks is that they can remain undetected for a long time.
Intrusions can be categorized as the most dangerous attacks against an organisation. These attacks penetrate into the internal network and/or internal systems. In recent times its effects have spread to wireless networks and Wi-Fi access points. Access could be gained in a variety of ways which are; not following security procedures by employees, weak passwords, weak methods of protecting digital certificates and or authentication tokens, etc. Once inside escalation of privileges is then envisaged by the intruder.
Malicious code is a kind of threat is widely referred to as “viruses†and “wormsâ€. Red Code and other amenities have been widely discussed within the general public on many occasions. Malicious code can act “on behalf†of the intruder. Ad hoc key loggers retrieve all keystrokes made on the keyboard, store it in an encrypted way accessible only to the intruder and mail it to a remote Far East mail server (of a company which does not have a clue it has been hacked). The same script is not detectable to anti-virus and anti-malicious-ware because they are made ad hoc thus the signature of the code are not known to world wide companies of anti viral software. The same script would then delete itself leaving the company totally unaware of the compromise. Malicious code attacks are pretty much more dangerous than human intruders. They run faster executing millions of operations per second, spread out in seconds, are unpredictable and until discovered, continue to run while damaging the systems.
Digital attacks are even more dangerous when exploited in subtle combination. The ability of the hacker to evade security protocols through skilful manipulations make it difficult to decipher the damage he is causing while at it. The careful combination and the consequent disguise of focus of the attack make it very effective. The ability of the attacker to invent a totally new combination and launch a completely new attack taking into account the predictable responses of the organisation makes it almost impossible to track him.
Methodology
Creativity can be used recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. (Franken, 2006). Continual technological changes necessitate a responsiveness of organizations creativity to stay up to speed nullifying negative threats and building on the positive opportunity. Bray et al (2007) examined organizational responsiveness in the context that inter individual knowledge exchanges, influence the ability of an organization to respond in an appropriate manner to changing an environment. They are of the view that presence of the exchanges guarantees the ability of an organization’s responsiveness in the positive direction.
Jacob (2003) proposes that responsiveness as a socially constructed attribute refers to the perceptual, reflective and adaptive dimension of an organization. According to him, organisations responsiveness provides a lens to reflect on the strategy and organizational development. Also social construction provides the platform on which responses are developed in unison.
Hence, organisations responses to digital threats involve individuals taking practical steps in learning the organizations structures and policies and developing strategies in increasing the organization’s adaptively.
Organisations should be able to invest heavily in effective security measures to ensure security of data is ensured. Effective counter strategies would prove most effective in containing threats against the organization. Business and organisations rely heavily on digital data files which are vital assets for companies. The productivity of a company depends greatly on how well protected a company is from threats. Digital security is considered to be no different from any other operational risk and not a management issue.
Given the creative nature of attacks, digital security cannot be approached “only†with top-down, rigid, prescriptive knowledge. The prescriptive knowledge and procedures which are the baseline of the organisational response to digital threats misses a most important factor which is creativity and innovation. Implementing creativity into digital security can prove difficult. However organisations should put in place measures to protect its self from basic threats and work towards consistently improving its security measures by encouraging creativity and discovering new potential threats.