Leadership: Company and Competition Analysis

During any persuasive executive presentation on security programming or initiatives, you can count on being asked how your idea or proposal compares to others in the industry and how the cost compares to your peers. For decades this has been a problematic because of a total lack of industry common benchmarks and information sharing. There is no area where this lack of common or shared definition is more evident than in determining cost of security. To complicate matters even more there has never been more intense interest on managements part for understanding and comparing these costs. This is due in part to the significant increases in total security budgets (often due to consolidating functions/services into security) in many companies over the last 10 years. To make matters even more complex no two companies are even organized alike. Security departments are organized in a wide variety of manners and their costs accounting methods are even more complex. Many times costs associated with security are decentralized to the business unit, the product line or the country in which the services are provided. Even when they are centralized and all costs are in the Corporate Security Headquarters budget, companies are not organized the same. In some companies physical security hardware costs are in the real estate or facilities budget. Pre-employment screening is often in the human resources budget. Computer and information security might be in the information technologies budget. So how can we get data to compare the cost of security in multiple companies. There is now an opportunity to participate an initiative underway to define and establish benchmarks for the “Total Cost of Security”. It will be the first to account for costs associated with individual programs and services by facility, location, country, business unit, differing cost centers, and other organizational variances. To receive the results of this ground breaking research you must participate. To do so you must contact the Security Executive Council at Contact@secleader.com and request the link to take the Roles and Responsibility Survey. It takes about an hour and results will be sent out when enough surveys are received to validate the research. I hope you take part. You can also visit our website at https://www.securityexecutivecouncil.com

Bob Hayes
Managing Director
Security Executive Council
202-730-9981
404-502-1600
bhayes@secleader.com

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