Step 4: The Non-Technical Presentation
You now have the information you need to prepare your product for stakeholders. Based on the research and work you’ve completed in Workspace, you will develop two items: a technical report for the director of IT, and a nontechnical slide show presentation for the members of the board. You will tailor the language of your reports appropriately to the different audiences.
The nontechnical presentation: Your upper-level management team consists of technical and nontechnical leadership, and they are interested in the bottom line. You must help these leaders understand the identity management system vulnerabilities you discovered in password cracking and access control. They need to clearly see what actions they must either take or approve. The following are a few questions to consider when creating your presentation:
- How do you present your technical findings succinctly to a nontechnical audience? Your technical report for IT will span many pages; but you will probably be afforded no more than 30 minutes or 8-10 slides for your presentation and the following discussion with leadership.
- How do you describe the most serious risks factually but without sounding too temperamental? No one likes to hear that their entire network has been hacked, data has been stolen, and the attackers have won. You will need to describe the seriousness of your findings while also assuring upper-level management that these are not uncommon occurrences today.
- How do your results affect business operations? Make sure you are presenting these very technical password cracking results in business terms upper-level management will understand.
- What do you propose? Management will not only want to understand what you have discovered; they will want to know what you propose as a solution.