Looking beyond guns and badges

Ominously, vaguely, federal officials are again warning Americans to be on alert for some sort of terrorist attack.

Will corporate America be ready?

In the months since the Sept. 11 attack on New York destroyed the World Trade Center towers, killed thousands of workers and disrupted dozens of companies, businesses have been forced to review their notions of corporate security. And with those assessments has come realization that the task calls for a new kind of corporate security executive -- one with breadth of experience, analytic skills, business acumen and leadership. In other words, corporate security calls for a chief security officer, or CSO, as the latest jargon describes it.

The security field's leading professional organization is drawing up a detailed description of the skills and responsibilities of chief security officer. The ideal is an executive not only familiar with the physical security of people and property, but also fluent in the security of computers and information: perhaps roughly equal parts top cop, business manager and computer geek.

Executive headhunters are recruiting people who fit the description and, with their talents suddenly much in demand, chief security officers can earn more than $400,000 a year. A new magazine, called CSO, is scheduled to begin publication in September.

And yet, for all the activity, "the truly broad-based candidates are relatively rare," said Lance Wright, a vice president of Boyden Global Executive Search, a recruiter. Despite the talent scouting by headhunters, companies are apparently taking their time in hiring senior security executives. A survey of 390 large companies last month by Christian & Timbers, a search firm, found that while 95 percent said they needed to hire a chief security officer, only 8 percent said they had begun searching.

And a separate study, "The Changing Nature of the Chief Security Officer," from the Giga Information Group, a research firm, found that while large corporations were increasing their security budgets and that some senior security executives' salaries were well into six figures others were making as little as $70,000.

With its eye on criminality and terrorism, the security field is "a different world and an unfamiliar world to a lot of mainstream businesspeople," said Timothy Williams, a former Cincinnati policeman with an MBA who directs corporate and systems security for Nortel Networks, the big communications equipment maker based in Canada. But different though it may be, Williams said, "security is a business process" -- a matter of setting priorities and strategy, establishing processes and measuring their effectiveness.

The CSO title is meant to suggest that security matters are becoming a more important and integral part of corporate life. About 15 years ago, another three-letter acronym for a new corporate title was coined and became increasingly popular: CIO, or chief information officer. But CIO was more than a name: It was a recognition that information technology was not just electronic plumbing or a narrow specialty, but something that could affect the mainstream business, strategy and competitiveness. CIO is now an established and respected corporate executive position at most major corporations.

It is too early to tell whether the CSO will eventually reach comparable stature. But even before Sept. 11, the corporate security field had been steadily evolving in response to the major business and technological developments of the last two decades.

Globalization, deregulation, outsourcing, just-in-time inventory practices, the embrace of information technology and the rise of the Internet have all brought greater openness and efficiency, along with new vulnerabilities.

The people managing security at large corporations have also changed with the times, well beyond the "guns and badges" days of mainly overseeing building security guards and investigations of the "who stole the petty cash" variety. In today's economy, a point of access in security terms is not just a headquarters office or a factory gate, but also a computer network connection that could be a gateway to a company's customer databases or product designs.

The senior security manager has "gone from a corporate cop guy to a real business position," said Grant Crabtree, vice president for corporate security at Alltel, a provider of wireless phone service and other telecommunications services, based in Little Rock.

Copyright 2002
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