Cybersecurity is the backbone of a successful digitalization of society, and cyber situation awareness is an essential aspect of managing it. The COVID-19 pandemic has sped up an already ongoing digitalization of Swedish government agencies, but the cybersecurity maturity level varies across agencies. In this study, we conduct a census of Swedish government administrative authority communications on cybersecurity to employees at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The census shows that the employee communications in the beginning of the pandemic to a greater extent have focused on first-order risks, such as video meetings and telecommuting, rather than on second-order risks, such as invoice fraud or social engineering. We also find that almost two thirds of the administrative authorities have not yet implemented, but only initiated or documented, their cybersecurity policies.

This paper is a workplace study of how financial advisors use their computer systems in advisory meetings with clients, with special focus on the collaborative decision-making. Observations and interviews show that the financial advisors in the study were not much helped by their computer system in visualizing and explaining financial concepts to their clients, and that not all of them trusted the system's decision support feature. Furthermore, client meetings can involve more than one client, which has further implications for the design of financial decision support.

Knowledge-intensive organizations are characterized by their dependency on highly skilled personnel who perform their daily work in a decentralized manner. In these organizations it is the users who make the important decisions, and therefore the organization's information security awareness is upheld by and depends on its users' combined security awareness. To assess the overall organizational security awareness it therefore becomes interesting to assess both the users' individual level of security awareness, as well as their level of consistency and conformity with regard to other users' awareness. In the present case study, 15 semi-structured interviews have been undertaken within a large telecommunication company in order to understand how significant IT security aspects are understood within the organization. The study highlights a number of perception differences where the technical IT staff and the ordinary users do not share the same understanding. It is suggested that these perception differences result from a paradoxical situation where the users' possibility to uphold security awareness is hindered because of security concerns.

Some organizations fail to involve users in systems development due to a widespread organization, high workload or secrecy issues. A remedy against this situation could be the persona method in which users and main stakeholders as represented as fictitious characters. Personas help eliciting user needs and requirements, facilitate design choices and are an overall communication aid where users cannot be present. An important part of the persona method, as portrayed in literature, is the personal details that make the personas trustworthy and alive. In this paper we present two cases in which personas have been developed and used, but where the personal is scarce or even non-existent because of a dispersed organisation, the organisational culture and secrecy issues. The paper describes how the personas were developed, used and received and how the method was altered in order to work in these special circumstances.