Risk Management and Insurance

This article examines the risks that businesses face including those of natural events such as severe storms, and technological risks such as those created by the Internet. The concept of a risk society is explained as well as how and why societies have become risk focused. The cost of damage from natural events is examined along with methods that insurance companies use to reduce their financial exposure to such risks. The risks posed by the Internet are reviewed and the use and purpose of cyber insurance policies are explained. The means by which insurance companies actively work at the societal level to reduce their risk is examined.

Keywords Climate Change; Cyber Insurance; Cyber Risk Insurance; External Risk; High-risk Customers; Insurance; Low Probability-High Consequence (LP-HC) Events; Manufactured Risks; Natural Disaster; Reinsurer; Risk Society; Risks Analysis; Technological Risks

Insurance & Risk Management > Risk Management & Insurance

Overview

We live in a world full of risks. Events of nature such as Hurricane Katrina affect international markets, such as oil, gas, and insurance. Attacks such as those of September 11, 2001 had the immediate effect of property damage and fatalities, inflicting direct damage estimated at nearly $80 billion. Both events caused significant business interruption losses, which were felt all over the world (Kunreuther, 2006).

There are also numerous risks that have been created by industrial societies (Giddens, 1999). Trains wrecking, bridges falling, and planes crashing are examples of technological risks (Lewis, 1990). All technologies have some sort of risk involved. Even the Internet is at risk and creates risks. Malicious code attacks on the Internet, for example, have caused billions of dollars in business disruption over the last decade (Erbschloe, 2004).

The Risk Society

Modern societies are often considered risk societies. A risk society is a society in which people “increasingly live on a high technological frontier which absolutely no one completely understands and which generates a diversity of possible futures” (Giddens, 1999, p. 3). According to Giddens, the origins of the risk society can be traced to two fundamental transformations: the end of nature and the end of tradition.

“The end of nature does not mean a world in which the natural environment disappears. It means that there are now few if any aspects of the physical world untouched by human intervention. For hundreds of years, people worried about what nature could do to them — earthquakes, floods, plagues, bad harvests and so on. At a certain point, somewhere over the past fifty years or so, people stopped worrying so much about what nature could do to them, and started worrying more about what they have done to nature. The transition makes one major point of entry in risk society. It is a society which lives 'after nature'” (Giddens, 1999, p. 3).

However, a risk society is also a society that lives after tradition. Giddens writes that, “to live after the end of tradition is essentially to be in a world where life is no longer lived as fate. For many people — and this is still a source of class division in modern societies — diverse aspects of life were established by tradition as fate. It was the fate of a woman to be involved in a domestic milieu for much of her life, to have children and look after the house. It was the fate of men to go out to work, to work until they retired and then — quite often soon after retirement — essentially to fade away” (1999, p. 3).

In post-industrial societies where some degree of economic mobility is possible, people no longer live their lives as fate, but rather make choices about how to live.

In modern risk societies, the management and elimination of risk have become preeminent drivers of public policy. In the contexts of science and public health, for example, the protection of public trust is a complex task. Those actors involved in public health decision-making and implementation (e.g., mass vaccination for influenza A virus) are confronted with growing pressures and responsibility to act. However, they also need to accept the limits of their own expertise and recognize the ability of lay publics to understand and be responsible for public health (Dupras & Williams-Jones, 2012).

Risk Distinctions

To analyze what a risk society is, one must make a series of distinctions. First of all, it is necessary to separate risk from hazard or danger. As Giddens points out, “A risk society is not intrinsically more dangerous or hazardous than pre-existing forms of social order. . . it is a society increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), which generates the notion of risk” (p. 3).

The word 'risk' has a negative connotation, since it refers to the possibility of an unwanted outcome. But it can be positive, in terms of taking bold initiatives in the face of a potentially problematic future. To distinguish risk from hazard, we must also make a distinction between two kinds of risk (Giddens, 1999):

  • External risk is the risk of events that may strike individuals unexpectedly (from the outside) but that happen often enough in a general population of people to be broadly predictable, and so insurable.
  • Manufactured risk is expanding in most aspects of human life. “It is associated with a side of science and technology, which the early theorists of industrial society by and large did not foresee. Manufactured uncertainty intrudes directly into personal and social life — it is not confined to more collective settings of risk. In a world where one can no longer simply rely on tradition to establish what to do in a given range of contexts, people have to take a more active and risk-infused orientation to their relationships and activities” (Giddens, 1999, p. 4).

Applications

Insurance & Risks from Nature

Man’s existence has always been plagued with unpredicted events in nature such as earthquakes, blizzards, hurricanes, floods, forest fires, tornadoes, and volcanoes. America was “fortunate to experience relatively few catastrophes from the 1960s through the 1980s, and even the property/casualty insurance industry, which pays for much of the damage, was lulled by years of relatively low losses. Premium rates fell to levels that allowed little to be set aside as a reserve for catastrophic losses” (Campbell, 1997, p. 6).

Kunreuther (2006) classifies natural disasters as low probability-high consequence (LP-HC) events. Since 1989, when Hurricane Hugo struck the Southeast and the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the San Francisco area, several worse disasters hit, with major financial consequences:

“Hurricane Andrew in South Florida in 1992, and the Northridge earthquake two years later near Los Angeles caused over $45 billion in damage (1997 dollars), with the insured loss at $30 billion. These events introduced a new sense of scale to the calculations of insurers, academic observers, rating agencies, and regulators. The reinsurance market reacted first, by raising prices and restricting coverage” (Campbell, 1997, p. 6).

Insurability

The perception of greater exposure to natural disaster has opened “fissures in the system” of risk management. Campbell writes,

“the question of insurability has become a public policy issue, beyond the possibility of insolvency of individual insurance firms. Some in the industry would turn to the government as insurer of last resort, since the government already issues flood insurance and provides disaster aid. But if government protection were extended without passing on the true costs to those property owners who incur the risks, it could encourage greater exposure and larger losses when the next big one hits” (1997, par. 4).

Unfortunately, regulated insurance pricing is inadequate in aligning an individual customer’s risk with the problem of adverse selection, i.e., placing himself or his property at greater risk than others. Campbell believes that, “premium rates are well below what are now considered to be actuarially sound levels” (par. 8). Insurance regulators (who are either elected or appointed) have been “loath to allow prices to rise much. And some firms, reluctant to cede growing markets to competitors, have decided to hold fast at the regulated, low prices” (par. 8).

Insurance against Cyber Risk

One of the most popular technologies, the Internet, has shown to have as much risk as it does promise. One of the biggest challenges that has come along with networked and Internet-connected computers is the absolute requirement of dealing with malicious code attacks. “If systems are not in some way equipped with anti virus protection, sooner or later some bug will eat them” (Erbschloe, 2004).

The unfortunate circumstances that wired societies face can be depicted in as follows:

  • Organizations and individuals want computing and communications resources and they want them as cheap as possible.
  • Software and hardware manufacturers synergistically work to meet market demands for cheap but highly functional computing and communications resources.
  • The corporate interests that drive cooperation between software and hardware manufacturers have resulted in a marketplace that is dominated by very few companies.
  • Market dominance by very few companies has created a computing and communications technology ecology with very few species.
  • The antitheses to the social forces that drive the dominant companies to cooperate in controlling the marketplace is a counter culture of malicious code writers that revels in embarrassing the corporate giants on their lack of technological prowess.
  • The small number of species in the technology ecology makes it easy for the malicious code writers to find vulnerabilities and launch attacks that can spread around the world in a very short time (Erbschloe, 2004, p. xv).

Additionally, the quickly growing market for smartphones, in combination with their near-constant on-line presence, makes these devices newer targets of malicious code writers. Aggravating the issue, the security level of these devices is below the state-of-the-art of what is used in personal computers (Wang, Gonz les, Menezes, & B rabasi, 2013).

Law enforcement agencies and the corporate giants that dominate the computer market label malicious code writers and attackers as criminals and at times even as terrorists. The malicious code writers and attackers view the corporate giants as criminal and parasitic organizations dominated by greedy capitalists. Meanwhile the governments of the computer-dependent parts of the world are struggling to unify their efforts to fight malicious code attacks and doing so largely under the umbrella of the global war on terrorism. These circumstances have created a marketplace in which virus protection and computer security product companies have thrived. This labyrinth of social, political, and economic forces has several results, many of which are very embarrassing for modern societies:

  • Very few malicious code attackers are ever caught by the police.
  • Government agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security in the United States, cannot catch up with malicious code attackers, let alone build a national defense system to stop attacks.
  • Large organizations that purchase technology are the prisoners of the dominant technology companies and have little recourse or market alternatives.
  • Elected public officials, many of whom are the recipients of campaign contributions from the dominant technology companies, are strongly resisting confronting the industry about product liability (from Erbschloe, 2004, p. xvi).

Methods for Avoiding Malicious Computer Attacks

Increasingly, the burden caused by these collective and converging trends falls upon the computer user. Traditionally, if companies and individuals wanted to keep their computers operational and the malicious code attackers at bay, they need to do two things:

  • First, take a comprehensive approach to dealing with malicious code attacks.
  • Second, become a customer of a well-established virus protection company and buy, install, and maintain that protection company's products on their computer systems (Erbschloe, 2004, p. xvi).

Cyber Insurance Policies

There is now another step that computer users can take to deal with the risks of malicious attacks. They can buy insurance. Cyber insurance policies are “designed to protect businesses should they fall victim to hacker attacks or other forms of online mischief or catastrophe. And more businesses are considering such coverage as worth the expense. According to the 2006 CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey, 29 percent of U.S. companies say they have external insurance policies to manage cyber security risks, up from 25 percent in 2005” (Briody, 2007, p. 47).

Available coverages include third-party network security, data privacy liability, Internet media liability, first-party business interruption, data asset loss, and cyber extortion. Add-on coverages include crisis management expenses, which cover costs incurred as a result of a data breach (Tsikoudakis, 2012).

Purchasing a cyber insurance policy is complex and the policies are complicated and pricey. Briody explains that, “Cyber risk has been frustratingly difficult for insurers to quantify. Because cyber insurance policies lack a long history, there is a dearth of actuarial data from which to base the premium rates” (p. 47). There is practically no precedent for technology-related insurance claims. Therefore, it is not uncommon for policies to come with several pages of “single-spaced exclusions” to the coverage. Such insurance policies also have difficult applications, which often demand that applicants undergo a third-party audit of their security practices (Briody, 2007).

The Corporate Information Security Working Group (CISWG), established in 2003 recommended that “insurers base the cost of cyber-risk insurance policies on a company's security posture to encourage adoption of best practices” (Vijayan, 2004).

Many insurance companies have now streamlined the application process. Policies and costs are often based on “the size of the company, the amount of data it holds on file, how many people have access to that information, security policies, whether data is encrypted, and whether the company has experienced losses in the past” (Briody, 2007, p. 48).

Older business insurance policies may actually have some cyber risk coverage. However, as cyber risks grow, insurers are beginning to add language to business liability policies that specifically excludes cyber-related liability. Insurers are marketing their cyber policies aggressively, and most experts agree that as more business is conducted electronically, the policies will become more widely adopted. Cyber insurance policies generally include coverage for the following incidents (Briody, 2007, p. 49):

  • Security and privacy issues such as legal liability arising from a failure of computer security or wrongful disclosure of confidential information.
  • Crisis management and notification costs such as the cost of notifying customers and PR expenses arising from the theft of consumer information. (Regulators in many U.S. states passed security breach notification laws in 2005, which spurred significant changes in insurance coverage, according to Peter Foster, executive VP of Willis North America's executive risks group in Boston [Tsitoudakis, 2012]).
  • Cyber extortion such as losses resulting from funds paid to terminate the threat of a computer attack.
  • Business interruption such as the expenses incurred as a result of a computer security breach.
  • Information asset such as the cost incurred by an insured to restore information that is destroyed or corrupted owing to a failure of computer security (Briody, 2007, p. 49).

Issues

How Insurance Companies Respond to Risks

Insurance companies of course make money on the existence of risks and the response of modern societies to risks. In a risk society, people want to make choices about how they live and they want some control over their future. They also want to buy insurance and the insurance companies are ready to sell it to them. Insurance companies, however, are also responsible for their own financial solvency and in many cases responsible for profitably and paying dividends to stock holders.

Encouraging Risk Reducing Behavior

How insurance companies have dealt with their own risks over time has evolved. One of the common ways insurance companies have reduced their own risks is to set requirements for policy buyer's risk management practices or to provide incentives for risk reduction behavior. Homeowners, for example, can get a reduced price on their home insurance if they install smoke detectors and health insurance is often less expensive for people that do not smoke cigarettes.

Insurance companies have also worked to change human behavior on a societal level. In the 1950s, many automobiles were not equipped with seat belts. Insurance companies pushed for national legislation to require that seat belts become standard equipment in newly manufactured automobiles. Insurance companies also supported awareness campaigns and used the "buckle up" slogan in their advertising efforts. Now seat belts are widely used and there are legal consequences for drivers that do not buckle up.

Risk Insurance & Global Warming

Political Transformations

Observations that the interest in global warming shown by insurance companies could transform the political dynamics of global warming have been widespread. In various contexts, different writers have argued or suggested that the emergence of insurance companies in climate politics could facilitate more aggressive greenhouse gas abatement than would otherwise be the case. As a business on the frontline of society's most risky activities, the insurance industry has a long tradition of spurring policy changes to help reduce society's risks. The financial size of the insurance industry (with estimates varying between $1.4 and $2 trillion), combined with the vulnerability of the sector (particularly the property insurance sector) because of the rise in extreme weather events, may be the basis for such involvement.

From the very early 1990s, some insurers started to voice concerns about the rise in incidence and severity of payouts resulting from large weather-related catastrophes, notably hurricanes and floods. As early as 1990, the Reinsurance Offices Association produced a report detailing the rise of such events, and observed that this could be connected to processes of climate change. Their report concluded that even a cursory glance at some of the basic principles of reinsurance reveals the concern that ought to exist about the greenhouse effect scenario.

For some, the potential threats to the interests and survival of insurers (and by extension, to large parts of the international financial system) from these catastrophes were great. In particular, the world's two largest reinsurers, Swiss Re and Munich Re, as well as some Lloyd's syndicates, claimed as early as 1992 that climate change could bankrupt the global insurance industry. The losses from Hurricane Andrew raised the possibility that one storm alone could cause such damages, if it hit a major city such as Miami, Washington DC or even possibly New York directly.

Inadequacy of Risk Assessment Methods

Insurance relies fundamentally on the ability to assess these risks on an actuarial, or probabilistic basis. This enables insurers to set premiums that will cover payouts. If global warming is changing the incidence and severity of such storms, and especially if it is doing so in a non-linear fashion, then the data about storms, floods, et cetera, on which companies have set premiums are no longer adequate. Worse, setting premiums on an actuarial basis is perhaps impossible given the constant change implied by the process of global warming.

Denial of Global Warming's Insurance Impact

At the same time, it is important to recognize that not all insurers have taken the line adopted by companies like Swiss Re and Munich Re. In particular, in North America, many companies have rejected claims about the possible bankruptcy of the industry. In April 1999, the American Insurance Association (AIA) published a report, which said that American property and casualty insurance was only marginally affected by the rise in extreme weather damage. The report said that significant exposure to weather-related losses only accounted for 20% of the industry's premium base, and that the industry could adapt fairly easily even if such increases were due to global warming. In North America, only the reinsurers, at least as represented by the Reinsurance Association of America, have been fairly positive about the global warming connection and the potential damage to the industry.

Reactions to Severe Weather Catastrophes

In particular, in immediate reaction to events such as Hurricane Andrew in 1992, many insurers attempted to withdraw coverage from particularly vulnerable areas, increase premiums in those areas, or act in other ways to minimize their exposure. In Florida, premiums went up by 72% between 1992 and 1996 after Hurricane Andrew (and doubled in the Miami area). In Hawaii, after Cyclone Iniki, one insurance company stopped offering residential cover. Overall, premium income for American reinsurers increased by 40% between 1991 and 1994. In many cases they have been heavily regulated both in relation to the provision of coverage and in relation to premiums, so that such attempts to minimize exposure are limited. In Florida, the state acted in 1993 to prevent major insurers from canceling existing policies.

Increasingly, however, insurance companies have acted in more subtle ways to achieve this goal, for example by making more stringent requirements in relation to building standards so that damage to buildings by events such as hurricanes is limited. Insurers in the United States formed the Insurance Institute for Property Loss Reduction in 1994, renamed as the Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) in 1997. This acts to educate those insured about how steps can be taken to reduce the losses caused, for example, by storms. It also acts to lobby for stronger building codes, so that losses would be reduced.

Collaboration with Scientists

In addition, insurers have substantially increased their collaboration with atmospheric scientists. The aim here is to develop ways of predicting extreme events over periods of a year to eighteen months. Breakthroughs in weather modeling in the mid-late 1990s, in particular in the understanding of the El Nino phenomenon, have made such forecasting possible, or at least soon to be possible. Since most property insurance covers one year periods, this then gives companies a much better basis for setting premiums (within regulatory limits), but also finding other ways of spreading the risk. In other words, while climate change threatens the actuarial nature of the data on which insurers normally make decisions about premiums, insurers are attempting to mitigate this by providing alternative means of predicting the risks to which they will be exposed.

Corresponding Initiatives

There have been a number of initiatives in this regard. In Bermuda (a major center for reinsurance, mostly serving the US market), the Bermuda Biological Station for Research established a Risk Prediction Initiative in 1994 in order to provide insurers with more reliable information about the likelihood of extreme weather events. In the UK, the TSUNAMI Initiative was established in 1998, funded by insurers such as CGNU and Royal and Sun Alliance as well as the UK Department of Trade and Industry. Organized through the Natural Environment Research Council, its mission is to engage in such research to improve the competitiveness of the UK insurance industry by using science to improve the assessment of risk (Murnane, 2004).

Conclusion

We live in a world full of risks. Events of nature such as Hurricane Katrina affect international markets, such as oil, gas, and insurance. There are also numerous risks that have been created by industrial societies (Giddens, 1999). Trains wrecking, bridges falling, and planes crashing are examples of technological risks (Lewis, 1990). All technologies have some sort of risk involved. Even the Internet is at risk and creates risks. Malicious code attacks on the Internet, for example, caused billions of dollars in business disruption from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s (Erbschloe, 2004).

A consensus is growing that the frequency and severity of recent disasters are not aberrations, but indicate a far greater societal exposure than previously recognized. Not only do insurance authorities expect more disasters, but more of the population now lives in vulnerable locations, such as along major fault lines in California or along seacoasts exposed to hurricanes. From 1970 to 1990, the population of the southeast Atlantic coastal counties increased by nearly 75 percent, almost four times the increase for the United States as a whole.

Traditionally, if companies and individuals wanted to keep their computers operational and the malicious code attackers at bay, they needed to do two things: take a comprehensive approach to dealing with malicious code attacks, and become a customer of a well-established virus protection company and buy, install, and maintain their products on their computer systems (Erbschloe, 2004, p. xvi). Now computer users can buy insurance. Cyber insurance policies are designed to protect businesses should they fall victim to hacker attacks or other forms of online mischief or catastrophe.

Insurance companies have also worked to change human behavior on a societal level. For example, in the 1950s many automobiles were not equipped with seat belts. Insurers pushed for national legislation to require that seat belts become standard equipment in all new automobiles. They also supported awareness campaigns and used the "buckle up" slogan. In the face of rising costs of payouts for damage from natural disasters, insurance companies are once again beginning to take action to reduce their risks.

Terms & Concepts

Cyber Insurance: Insurance policies designed to protect businesses should they fall victim to hacker attacks or other forms of online mischief or catastrophe.

External Risk: The risk of events that may strike individuals unexpectedly (from the outside, as it were) but that happen regularly enough and often enough in a whole population of people to be broadly predictable, and so insurable.

High-risk Customers: Insurance policy holders that live in areas that are exposed to frequent or severe risks.

Low Probability-High Consequence (LP-HC) Events: Events such as large hurricanes or terrorist attacks which happen with a low frequency but cause considerable damage or economic disruption.

Manufactured Risks: Risks that are created by societies because of demographic characteristics or the use of technology (see technological risks).

Technological Risks: Risks caused or created by technologies which can include trains wrecking, bridges falling, and planes crashing.

Risk Society: A risk society is a society in which people “increasingly live on a high technological frontier which absolutely no one completely understands and which generates a diversity of possible futures” (Giddens, 1999, p. 3).

Bibliography

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Erbschloe, M. (2004). Trojans, worms, and spyware: A computer security professional's guide to malicious code. Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Giddens, A. (1999). Risk and responsibility. Modern Law Review, 62, 1. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=10453500&site=ehost-live

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Radcliff, D. (2000). Got cyber insurance? Computerworld, 34, 44. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=3522837&site=ehost-live

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Vijayan, J. (2004). Group urges feds to leverage buying power to boost security. Computerworld, 38, 6-6. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=12916261&site=ehost-live

Wang, P., Gonz lez, M., Menezes, R., & Barab si, A. (2013). Understanding the spread of malicious mobile-phone programs and their damage potential. International Journal of Information Security, 12, 383-392. Retrieved November 14, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Business Search Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=90290394&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Clemens, P., & Pfitzer, T. (2006). Risk assessment & control. Professional Safety, 51, 41-44. Retrieved November 2, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=19579170&site=ehost-live

Crossman, M., Richardson, D., & Milne, J. (2006). A partnership approach to managing flood risk. Civil Engineering, 159, 41-45. Retrieved November 2, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=23045448&site=ehost-live

Eldred, G. (1980). How wisely do consumers select their property and liability insurance coverages? Journal of Consumer Affairs, 14, 288. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=5211195&site=ehost-live

Horne, S. (2005). 10 insurance top tips. Farmers Weekly, 143, 28-31. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=19367873&site=ehost-live

Jacobson, R. (1999). Bargains (for now) in business insurance. Nation's Business, 87, 32. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=1866302&site=ehost-live

le Masurier, J., Blockley, D., & Wood, D. (2006). An observational model for managing risk. Civil Engineering, 159, 35-40. Retrieved November 2, 2007, from EBSCP Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=23045447&site=ehost-live

Michaels, A., & Malmquist, D. (1997). Climate science and insurance risk. Nature, 389(6648), 225. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9709281145&site=ehost-live

Piampiano, J., & Rizzo, S. (2006). How safe is safe?: Techniques for advancing and applying machinery risk assessments. Professional Safety, 51, 22-27. Retrieved November 2, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=21005677&site=ehost-live

Young, V., & Zariphopoulou, T. (2002). Pricing dynamic insurance risks using the principle of equivalent utility. Scandinavian Actuarial Journal, 2002, 246-279. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=7385939&site=ehost-live

Essay by Michael Erbschloe

Michael Erbschloe is an information technology consultant, educator, and author. He has taught graduate level courses and developed technology-related curriculum for several universities and speaks at conferences and industry events around the world. Michael holds a Masters Degree in Sociology from Kent State University. He has authored hundreds of articles and several books on technology.