Recently, Marisa Peacock-an author with both experience as a marketing consultant as well as a social media strategist wrote an article mainly focusing on the misuse of a large sum of money within a few corporate computer companies. The way in which the money was used within these computer companies was for security purposes in terms of corporate secrets. This article explains the idea that "executives seem to underestimate the value of their information" (paragraph 5). Since the companies are focusing on using all their time and money protecting their secrets, all the data stored within computers is being lost whenever they are stolen. The article states that "the cost of losing data is even greater" (paragraph 14) causing the companies a minimum of “US$ 363,000 per incident" (paragraph 16).
The text book, Working with Economics a Canadian Framework, explains the idea of resources becoming scarce continuously while still enduring the topic of opportunity cost. After reading Peacock's article, it is clear that the scarce resource within this article is money. The computer companies spend their money directly on systems used to help keep their corporate secrets, causing there to be a rather large lack of money to spend on protecting the information data stored on every single one of the computers. The opportunity that they could have had is to either evenly spend their money on both the corporate secrets as well as the data information or perhaps spend all of the money entirely on keeping the data information safe seeing as it's more important.
After reading chapter one in the text book, Working with Economics a Canadian Framework, and specifically focusing my attention towards opportunity cost and the way in which this idea works, it's hard for me to believe that corporate leaders of a computer company could use their money in such an un-wisely way. In my opinion, I think that after seeing how much computers are getting stolen away from them, they should consider the fact that maybe the data information within those computers are slightly more important than some of their secrets-no matter how scandalous.
-Lorena Laurencelle
Link: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/study-corp-compliance-a-huge-waste-of-money--007201.php
