Author: Justin Crump
ISBN No: 9781466592704
Review date: 04/05/2024
No of pages: 297
Publisher: CRC Press
Publisher URL:
http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466592704
Year of publication: 01/06/2015
Brief:
Corporate Security Intelligence and Strategic Decision Making by Justin Crump
In Corporate Security Intelligence and Strategic Decision Making, Justin Crump makes well the case for corporate security intelligence as playing its part in what he calls ‘intelligent security’.
Using security intelligence can prepare your business for what you can see coming; and event prevent threats from emerging. It’s a good return on investment, he stresses, ‘helping to position the security function at the top table and established as more of a facilitator and aid to business’. The able security manager with ambitions to become a chief security officer ought to read – and more to the point, act on – this book.
The author goes through the case for corporate security intelligence – such as the multiple threats to the global business, and the sheer amount of information, and the ways that a company can come a cropper from regulators. Given that there’s so much data, so much stuff out there, Crump takes quite a theoretical approach rather than swimming in facts. Briefly, he describes intelligence as a process, ‘for dealing with uncertainty, reducing it to as low a level as is reasonably possible given inevitable constraints’. It has to be ‘accurate, timely, relevant, and ideally actionable’. He takes you through how to collect intelligence, analyse it, and spread it (to the right people, and well presented – busy people may be turned off by pages and pages, no matter how good or important). Besides working always against the clock, you have to judge the quality of a source, to be alert to changes that may alter your organisation’s alert status; and stay alert yourself to who to share your findings with, and get them read. We may take that for granted, as gathering and using intelligence is part of human nature, whether the building manger facing single-issue activists, the Turf form-follower or the Army officer trying to work out what’s happening ‘on the other side of the hill’. As Crump rightly says, ‘the best conclusions in the world – and the most insightful analysis – are of little use if they are overlooked’. If for whatever reason you didn’t get your intelligence across in good time, it’s no use saying ‘we told you so’ after the event.
A pithy, readily-understandable and altogether impressive work.
Corporate Security Intelligence and Strategic Decision Making, by Justin Crump, published 2015 by CRC Press. Hardback, 297 pages, £49.99, ISBN 9781466592704. Visit www.crcpress.com.