Re: The State of Information Security, 2004 (survey)

[George Capehart <capegeo () opengroup org>]

On Tuesday 07 September 2004 10:34, Robert Brewer allegedly wrote:

<snip>

> > In a paragraph above, the authors of the article write:
> > "The results shown in this report are based on the responses of
> > more than 8,000 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CSOs, vice presidents and
> > directors of IT and information security from 62 countries"
> > Which sure makes it sound like the survey respondents were execs
> > and bigwigs. But then in terms of title at the bottom they disclose
> > that 58 out of the respondents held IT titles. In other words,
> > 0.7% (that's 7 in a thousand!) were CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CSOs
> > etc... -- a bit of a contradiction.
>
> Not to take the wind out of your sails, but I think it's safe to
> assume they meant 58 _percent_.
>
>  58
> +14
> +11
> +17
> ---
> 100

Whatever.  Those data still mean absolutely nothing.  This is *still* a 
self-selected sample which does not independently verify the position 
title, nor apparently distinguish among title nor size of organization.  
C'mon.  This sample was derived from magazine mailing lists for crying 
out loud.  How many people do you know that are "creative" in filling 
out the qualification forms for those magazines.  How many people do 
you know who are CEOs of fictional or size-of-one companies . . .  
those numbers (I started to use the term data, but they're *not* data) 
are worse than useless.  There is *absolutely* no basis for confidence 
in the randomness of the sample or the validity of the classification 
of the "data" sources.  As mjr said in his original post . . . this is 
a case of GIGO passed off as information.  This truly would get an F in 
any of the statistics or experimental methodology courses I took.

FWIW.

George Capehart
-- 
George W. Capehart

"If you push something hard enough, it will fall over."
  -- Fudd's First Law of Opposition


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