Envisioning a New Security Industry for 2020
Posted on Wed, Feb 23, 2011
By Bob Hayes
Managing Director for the Security Executive Council, Strategic Leadership Knowledge Partner for the ASG Security Summit & The Great Conversation™
Security professionals in many companies still express difficulty in getting management to see them as a true business function. Perhaps that’s because Security continues to lag behind other business functions in many ways, and our inability to draw together as a bona fide industry has held up our ability both to innovate and to mitigate.
We should and must do better in the coming decade. We must set the year 2020 as a long-range goal for better physical and logical security, innovation, risk mitigation, and intelligence. But we have a lot of work to do. There are a few things this industry must focus on if we’re to have a hope of getting there.
We must learn to listen to each other. The security industry comprises multiple factions—practitioners, integrators, manufacturers, and consultants among them. We cannot achieve improved risk response without equal input from all of these groups. For example, it stands to reason that practitioners know what they need, but manufacturers can’t invest in creating that unless practitioners make them aware of the necessity. The Great Conversation™ is one step toward this goal, but more must be done.
We must become more inclusive. Some industry participants focus all their energies on a single market or business type. In some cases this pushes all the innovation and communication to one end of the spectrum, leaving many businesses little or no influence over our industry’s direction. Small businesses, for example, tend to be left to fend for themselves, as my recent article in Security Technology Executive magazine explains. Because we’re not all working together, we are leaving out whole constituencies that need to be included in our Great Conversation™. If anyone’s ideas and resources are excluded, we remain a vulnerable industry.
We must enhance our ability to see trends and risks on the horizon. Many of the damaging events of the last decade could have been avoided or made less damaging if the right people had been able to see them coming. The same applies to the smaller threats that we see every day. We, as an industry, too often overlook the early signs of danger. Once again, collaborative communication is a key to correcting this issue.
We must document our industry. Security research is too often based on opinions and incomplete samples or respondent pools, or it is focused on only one sector rather than the industry as a whole. We must begin working together to document the business of security, as so many other business functions have already done for their own fields.
Security has to stop operating in silos. If we don’t all have all the information we can collectively provide, we cannot act in the best way possible, and we cannot adequately mitigate risk. By starting the conversation, becoming more inclusive, better identifying horizon issues, and developing reliable research and documentation, we can reach the future state of 2020 Security.