One famous saying attributed to Steve Jobs must be: “it doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
It makes sense and security is no exception. How often do I see companies struggling to improve their level of security hiring external consultant while they have very talented and smart people capable of solving most of the issues… if you let them do it.
It might seem exaggerated but it is not so far from the reality. Your people may not have all the answers but they have likely solutions to a vast majority of your issues.
During lot of audit (or due diligence or GAP assessments), I interviewed managers and employees in order to get an idea of what works and what don’t in a company. Obviously, we check the incidents, the KPIs, the financial losses and all the possible indicators but its the discussion with the persons performing the jobs that give you the best insights. Rapidly, we can get a sense of where there is a bottleneck, a gap or an issue to fix. That’s normal, it is what we expect from external consultants. But what is often more surprising is that the same people are aware of the issues and have most of the time lot of ideas to fix them. It make sense as they are sometimes the persons suffering the most from these issues.
So, why are the issues still present? There is a lot of possibilities. One of the most common is the believe that the boss is always right (you know, rule #1). Hence, he likely know how to fix the problem, no reason to bother him with our stupid solutions. It creates blind spots. That’s probably why the space shuttle Columbia ended-up in ashes (see http://www.space.com/19476-space-shuttle-columbia-disaster-oversight.html).
Another possible reason is the difficulty of the people from the low level of the pyramid to talk the highest level’s lingo. Senior executives rarely want’s to have their hands dirty or to get involved in technical details or business processes considerations. I saw a few years ago a CIO meeting all the persons in its IT department (hundreds of people). Each meeting with a team gave him multiple hint on what was blocking or impacting the efficiency of his teams. And when you do, it’s easier to get the big picture and take the right decisions.
Another issue is the believe that the top management expect only green lights and positive outcome. “Failure is not an option” is a culture typically leading to failure. Also, sometimes, teams have opposed objectives, hence, they don’t work together to solves common issues but rather they fight each others or they continuously pass the hot potato. Not a good way to solve issues either.
A good and efficient security management, like any other corporate governance, requires an appropriate culture, fostering trust, empowerment, responsibility and so on. But these are more than words, they must be applied to be effective. bringing external consultants to fix internal issues is not always the best solution to improve your culture: it just send the message you don’t trust your team have the skills to do it.
You might want to try to express your expectations and discuss with everybody (or designated someone to do it) to figure out the best way to improve the situation. And if they need resources (what is likely the case) then maybe hire (external) people to reduce their current workload so they can start working on the changes.
Last tip: check your workforce’s skills… there’s sometimes people in your company who are doing work for which they are over-qualified and who could do jobs that could really provide you more added-value. Don’t look too far for your glasses, they might be on your nose.
Think about it.
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