Addressing the Digital Forensic Challenges Within Modern Law Enforcement : A study of digital forensics and organizational buying behavior from a DF-company perspective

Sammanfattning: Today’s law enforcement agencies are presented with challenges regarding how to navigate the rapidly changing technical landscape. The proliferation of digital devices in society has presented opportunities for modern criminals, resulting in substantial changes in criminal behavior. Digital devices have, thus, become a crucial piece of evidence within forensic investigation processes, which has caused the field of digital forensics to emerge as a central part of modern law enforcement. However, law enforcement is experiencing substantial challenges in regard to handling the complexity of modern digital devices, as well as the data quantities that these devices imply. While digital forensics literature commonly discusses the challenges that law enforcement agencies are facing, it fails to address the role and responsibilities that the digital forensic companies have in ensuring that law enforcement agencies possess the necessary means to counteract criminal activity. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how the companies that supply the tools that law enforcement depends on, can help the agencies to overcome these challenges. Although the need for digital forensics is at an all time high, the consensus among practitioners is that they lack the necessary means to adequately handle digital evidence. Moreover, it is identified that lack of organizational understanding is impeding law enforcement from prioritizing allocation of capital towards digital forensics. Thus, this study also assesses how digital forensic companies can adapt their marketing approaches based on the purchasing behavior of law enforcement, in order to efficiently communicate the need within the customer organizations and ensure that law enforcement agencies possess the necessary means to counteract modern criminality. In order to investigate this area of research and address the identified problems, ii the study is set up as a case study in collaboration with a European digital forensic company. The study includes several internal interviews with company representatives, as well as a large amount of external interviews with digital forensic experts from different European law enforcement agencies. The empirical evidence is assessed against renowned literature within digital forensics and organizational buying behavior to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the problems and help answer the proposed research questions. The study concludes that the main challenges that law enforcement is facing in regard to digital forensics originate from a lack of organizational understanding. This results in insufficient resources being allocated towards digital forensics. In turn, this limits law enforcement’s ability to properly educate their staff and purchase the necessary tools to effectively handle the complexity and quantity of evidence that modern digital forensics implies. To address this, digital forensic companies are required to adapt their business models to the resource limitations of their customers by offering more flexible training solutions and tailor the tools based on specific user needs. Moreover, it is determined that companies should be involved in pursuing law enforcement management to improve the organizational understanding regarding the importance of digital forensics. The study also identifies that the organizational structure of law enforcement agencies highly impact their purchasing behavior. Depending on the degree of law enforcement centralization, the buying center structure varies. For centralized organizations the scale of the buying center is generally larger and the same applies for its purchases. The individual members of the buying center have minor influence over the decision making process, instead the decisions are a consequence of collective decision making by different departments. In contrast, decentralized organizations make smaller purchases through smaller buying centers. The individual members within the decentralized buying center have far more influence over the buying behaviour in comparison to the members of a centralized organization’s buying center. Therefore, digital forensic companies need to employ different marketing strategies to anchor their products within different law enforcement organizations. It is established that companies should aspire to identify the buying centers of potential and existing customer organizations, to improve efficiency of marketing efforts. Mapping out organizational and authoritative structure is, thus, concluded to be crucial in order to successfully capitalize on the purchasing behavior of different law enforcement organizations. To enable digital forensic companies to practically apply these suggestions within the context of their marketing strategies, applicable models based on theory and empirics are proposed.