NEWS

Speaker Spotlight—Philip S. Deming, CPP, CFE, SPHR

By Matthew Harwood
09/18/2009 -

Only days before Seminar, Philip S. Deming, CPP, CFE, SPHR, spoke with Security Management about the ASIS Foundation’s Business Watch Program. Funded by a grant from the Department of Justice, the neighborhood watch-like program helps security professionals create cost effective programs and partnerships to increase awareness and institutionalize crime prevention strategies in the workplace and across industries. Deming says the Business Watch program will help private security professionals become strategic business partners within their company, demonstrating value by showing senior management a return on investment. Catch his presentation on the Business Watch Program next week at Seminar. 

A 25-year journeyman in the security profession, Deming runs Philip S. Deming & Associates, a consulting firm specializing in human resource and security risk management.
 
What is the Business Watch program? And how does it differ from a Neighborhood Watch program, considering most people are familiar with them?
 
The Business Watch program was modeled after Neighborhood Watch as an outreach program. It was designed to enhance awareness and institutionalize crime prevention strategies in the workplace, with the support of strategic partners in the community, such as local or state law enforcement and federal agencies. That was the genesis for the program, to get corporations involved in doing their own crime prevention as it relates to their needs and the dynamics of their business. Our program is primarily designed for the security professional to implement in a whole host of different businesses including those with multiple locations, those with more than 1,000 employees, and those with different types of problems facing their general business. So if you have a large corporation where they have multiple locations and multiple issues, the security professional can come out with a program that addresses a holistic approach to various crimes in their different locales or as a global crime prevention program. The program is not just about crime prevention. It allows the security professional to become a business partner with his corporate colleagues and create a whole different relationship with employees.  Now the security person is conveying information on crimes and strategic ways of mitigating those to his business partners, while he is also getting information back from employees. In this way, the security professional becomes a lot wiser as to what’s happening in the business community, particularly his or her business community. And he can now develop programs to address those particular risks that face, not only that company, but also those strategic partners as well.
 
So it’s another strategy for security professionals within a company to prove their worth? To prove they do bring a return on investment?
 
Yes. As part of the development for the Business Watch, the ASIS Foundation—with the support of an advisory council for the Business Watch Grant and the ASIS International Crime and Loss Prevention Council—came up with strategic guidelines to aid security professionals with a six-step approach so he or she is now in a position to roll out a business watch. But one of the first steps in that process is to get the security professional to consider what type of return on investment he or she can expect to achieve with a Business Watch program. The example I give during presentations is that you’re the security person and you have a particular problem in a workplace. Rather than say you’re going to spend X-amount of dollars for security hardware and apparatus and personnel, you’re there looking at the problem and saying “If I spend X dollars for security, what’s that return going to be to my business partner?” If I’m able to demonstrate that spending $200,000 for a security apparatus can impact the turnover rate for an HR person or the operations person and that cost savings far outweighs the $200,000 investment, I’ve proven my value.
 
So you’re saying that if a corporation exists where people fear for their lives or their property, they’re going to quit?
 
Absolutely. If you come up with a very holistic approach on security, you can stop that employee from saying, “I don’t want to work here because my car has been broken into” or “I’ve been assaulted coming from the bus stop to the office.” If you can mitigate that, and you keep an employee in the workplace, you’ll be able to save the company dollars in recruiting, background investigations, and training.
 
How do you envision the Business Watch program starting somewhere? What’s the catalyst going to be for security professionals to get this going? Also, what it seems like you’re proposing is creating pockets of business cooperation and intelligence sharing, if I have it correctly.
 
It really varies by the type of business that a security professional is in. That’s one of the first steps that security professionals will take if they’re using the Strategic Guidelines. The first step is diagnosing the environment and considering the business. Are you in a retail environment versus a software design or technology company? What are the kinds of risk that impact your business that you can be a strategic partner to aid in it? If you’re in a retail business, risks like identity theft and assaults on employees and customers are identified, allowing security professionals to design a program based on those risks you’re trying to mitigate.
 
If you work for  a sophisticated company, as an example  a technology design organization, and your biggest concern may be with employees stealing that technology or unauthorized parties entering  your facility and obtaining  sensitive information, your Business Watch may be very different than a Business Watch  in the retail environment. So it really requires the security professional  to be a “business person,” look at their business, and determine how they want to mitigate those risks.   Can these strategies offered be of   value to the company? From this platform, it allows the security person to enter into   a discussion to develop a program where the security professional can provide strategic value to the mission and goals of that organization. Moreover, the security professional can open up a whole level of communication with employees and create valuable employee relations as opposed to the traditional model where the kind of interfacing that an employee would typically have with a security professional would be concerning a problem. You know, the security guard was aggressive with me? Or my access card no longer works here? Or my car was broken into or my company laptop was taken? They’re all incident-specific-driven and problem-oriented issues with a security person. Through a Business Watch Program, they become more of a “strategic business partner” within the company and open a whole new channel of communication so that they can be more strategically placed in the company. It is vital, especially in this economy, to show value and to help decide whether a business can replace the human part of security with automation. This gets the security professional to be part of the discussion at the table with senior management.
 
So the Business Watch program is all about making the security department a much more proactive force inside the business environment?
 
Absolutely. What I like to say is that they are a strategic partner with the business.
 
You’ve spoken about security cooperation but how often really do security departments from different corporations want to share security information with each other? If you can do security better than your competition, doesn’t that give you a competitive advantage?
 
It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re a technology-based, very competitive business, you’re absolutely correct. Let me give you a classic example, however, of where Business Watch has been very effective is in the hospitality industry. If you’re in an urban area with five or six hotels and all of the hotels are being hit by pickpockets, then there’s a common interest to stop that. By getting together and having monthly meetings with the local police and sharing information regarding profiles of suspects or types of crime with each other, security professionals have a better chance to eliminate that threat. That’s what I would call the traditional model of Business Watch.
 
It’s opposite with a high-tech company. If you’re manufacturing computers, you certainly don’t want to interface with your competitor relative to the information or technology pieces to it, but you may exchange information with your counterpart when they’re doing software or hardware piracy. This is because the same type of criminal element that is likely to pirate your data or firmware or hardware is likely to do your competitors. So you may enter into some type of discussion there on a limited basis. From my own personal view, having been in the cable industry, we used to share information as it related to the manufacturer level, but it was always very tempered so we did not expose any vulnerabilities of our software or technology infrastructure.
 
Do you feel like there’s a definite trend towards more cooperation rather than going it alone?
 
Yes. I think it makes sense from an economic standpoint. If you’re a director of security and you’ve got a particular crime affecting your business, there’s a good probability that others within your business community are affected by it—whether it is assault in the parking lots or identity theft or information breaches. By speaking with colleagues in the industry and sharing ideas, you certainly will come up with something creative to stop such threats. For example, company A may do something very innovative and if you can replicate that in your business environment, you’re ahead of the game. And so rather than hire an outsider to come up with an idea, you’re cultivating that information from your own investigations with your professional colleagues.
 
What are you trying to get across to ASIS members at Seminar and what are you expecting of them when they leave that room that day?
 
What we’re going to be doing at Seminar is introducing the strategic guidelines that were developed for the Business Watch program under a Department of Justice grant. It will focus on the six steps of success, which includes diagnosing a problem, creating a vision, developing your goals, forming a working partnerships with alliances, designing a system for aligning your resources, and how to institutionalize your program. What we have seen from our surveys with ASIS members is that there are programs out there that have been quasi-successful and there are ones that haven’t been successful and haven’t lasted that long.
 
With our six steps, we’re taking that security person and giving them a framework from which to look at their business. When they walk out of that room at noon on the 21 September, they will be able to say, “I understand the six steps. I understand what I need to do to develop a Business Watch and how to do it.” Also within that seminar, there’s going to be two additional speakers with me. And they are going talk about their individual programs. Ms. Sarah L. Conley, CPP, an advisory council member for the Business Watch Grant, is from Waste Management and she’s going to be speaking about their “Waste Watch” program that has been nationally recognized in terms of what they do and how they branded their Business Watch program, using their employees to be observers and reporters of crimes as they drive their trash trucks throughout the community. Mr. Glen Kitteringham, CPP, another advisory council member for the Business Grant,  who represents a large international property management company, will speak about Business Watch programs that they have for their tenants. So attendees are going to see two different models and they’re going to see the six steps and how it will make sense to them. So if they’re a competitor of say, Waste Management, they’ll say, “Gee, our competitor does this. It makes sense. It’s a good program. We may want to employ that too.” But by using the six steps, an attendee may say, “Ah, I’m going to use it a different way that Waste Management did.” Or if I’m in property management and I heard the other speaker talk about his program, maybe I’ll take pieces from that and develop out the rest.
 
Using the example of two waste management firms competing against each other, in your ideal world are you hoping these two firms cooperate more with each other to provide more security to the community itself? Or will they use it for their own self-interest and gain a competitive advantage from it?

Underneath Waste Watch, they’re simply taking their drivers, training them to be good observers, and explaining how to report crimes. All they’re doing is asking employees to get involved. They’re giving them the tools for understanding what their actions should be. And when these trash men drive around at 2 a.m. picking up trash and they observe criminal activity, they’re now reinforced by their culture to get involved and call the police if they see suspicious activity or a break-in. The competitive piece is lost there. It sounds nice and it has a nice market image, but the bottom line is it provides another layer of eyes and ears for the community to report certain crimes. But it does have a positive impact in the community and it serves the interest of both the business and the citizen. The citizen now has somebody reporting a crime to the police and the corporation employee that reports it gets credit and the corporation gets recognized as a good corporate citizen. So there’s a win-win situation throughout, as opposed to worrying about whether your competitor has a similar program.

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