This afternoon’s 45th webinar in the OSPAs thought leadership series chaired by Prof Martin Gill of Perpetuity dug into an important yet seldom-admitted topic; technology is often assumed to be a benefit, but is it really, if it’s not installed properly, or users aren’t trained? And if that’s so, what to do about it?
The speakers were, from the United States, Jill Davie, President of the webinar sponsor TEAM Software (which acquired the UK guarding software company Innovise); Eddie Sorrells, Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel, DSI Security Services; and Jeff Chludzinski, CFO, at Jacksonville-based First Coast Security; and from the UK, Simon Pears, a CSyP (Chartered Security Professional) and Global Security Director at the multi-national outsourced services firm Sodexo.
Those speakers did admit that there was a case to answer, from start to finish; Eddie summed up that if you don’t have policies, processes and controls, technology will fail; and may even produce more problems than the ones it was brought in to solve. Jeff advised that you can’t buy in tech in a vacuum; and you have to prepare for how technology can go wrong; while Simon said that a large proportion of technology (as taken up by the security industry) is not used to the full, for lack of user training, ‘a huge missed opportunity for the industry’.
Earlier, Eddie began by acknowledging that technology has made security more efficient – when done correctly, it can result in a more secure environment, and return on investment (RoI) for the end user: “But I believe as an industry we must embrace technology for the solution and not just for the fact that it is there and available; it must be managed like any process involving human resources and assets.” We should ask; what problem is the tech trying to solve, and does the tech actually solve the problem? “We often get these two questions mixed up.”
More in the October 2020 print edition of Professional Security magazine. For a previous webinar, on climate change and the security sector, see the September print edition.
The next webinar, on Tuesday, August 25, is on ‘value of data driven intelligence in security operations: influential or overstated’, sponsored by TrackTik; and next Thursday, ‘the security sector and the harms caused by Covid-19: what have we learned so far’. You can sign up for free, or listen to past sessions.
Visit https://theospas.com/thought-leadership-webinars/.
