ASG's Security Solutions Blog

The Business Problem

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

  

  

By ASG's Professional Services Group

How is security viewed inside your organization? If you could walk around and ask 10 employees why you have cameras or these badges that you swipe to gain access to doors, what would they say? I am going to guess the answers would vary - SIGNIFICANTLY. This leads us to the first problem in our series: “The Business Problem" and the information that you need to answer it.

With the economy struggling and employers looking ways to cut and optimize spending, your security budget is on the line. Why do we need all of these card readers? Why do we keep installing cameras? How does security even help us? These are all questions that if you don’t have a clearly articulated strategy and answer for each, your value to the organization is in question. The old model of security revolved around Area 51 style of operations where no one asked questions and security did what they wanted with a limited budget. Today the game has changed. Your budget is open for discussion and your operations are more like SportsCenter highlights. Everything is up for review and everyone has an opinion of what you should have done. Listed below are three ways you can demonstrate security’s value to the business through information sharing and help to eliminate the problem of not being valuable to the business.

1. Communicate to employees. Brown bag sessions, employee orientation and webinars are great ways to tell people what you are doing and why you are doing it. You will be amazed just how many walls can be broken down by telling people the intent behind something without having to make them guess.

2. Create a strategy about where you are going and what you want to do and think BIG! Too often we are caught up in what is going on today and people perceive security as those people who always say they are really busy and do not have a vision for the future. Create a strategy, communicate it and execute it. Just because you do not have budget now, doesn’t mean you won’t have a larger budget in the future especially if you can get in front of the right people and explain how your strategy is going to help the business and not just the security group. 

3. Metrics are key. We are going to touch on this in a later blog, but at a high level if you can’t articulate what your group has done to date and how that has helped the business then you aren’t valuable. How many bad guys were found? How many lawsuits were dropped due to video? How many square feet of floor space are you monitoring now compared to last year? These types of numbers can easily justify a new position or retain current ones.

Information is absolutely vital to the success of your group and how they respond to incidents, handle events, retain and increase budget and communicate with employees. In many cases it’s not the fact that you don’t have the information. It may be that you haven’t communicated it to employees, strategized around it or created metrics that support it. If you can successfully do these things, security won’t be seen as a secret society anymore and should increase your known value to the business.