Why Your Company Must Have Firm Operational Boundaries

[Audrey McNeil <audrey () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://www.inc.com/ric-edelman/why-your-company-must-have-firm-operational-boundaries.html

What happens in your company when issues such as the following arise?

One of your products loses a significant percentage of market share.
The company fails to respond to a customer's complaint or rectify a privacy
breach within a designated period.
You lose a sale or customer to a competitor.

Well-run companies don't let issues like these occur without a response.
Leadership steps in immediately to find out what caused the problem and
make whatever adjustments are needed to prevent a recurrence.

Have you established boundaries within your company that automatically
trigger attention when those boundaries are crossed?

Doing so is an effective way to keep staff members focused on their
objectives and the business operating harmoniously. Failure to set
boundaries can allow small issues to fester and morph into larger
ones--ultimately costing your company huge losses, both financial and
reputational.

When you set boundaries, make sure everyone knows what's expected and how
the process works--how protocol breaches are to be reported, who will
respond, when and in what way, how progress will be measured and what
everyone can learn from the experience.

At my firm, for example, we track the number of days we go without anything
occurring outside our established norms. Everyone knows how long it's been
since the last incident--because we post it on our intranet--and they know
when an incident occurs because we reset the clock. That puts everyone on
notice that they'll soon learn what happened (without naming names) and how
we can all prevent it from happening again. Thankfully, we don't have to
reset the clock often--and I'm convinced that our approach helps make that
happen.

Telling everyone the boundaries helps motivate them to stay within those
limits. It also becomes more likely that you and your leadership team will
learn of problems--giving you greater opportunity to resolve them. This can
help improve your company's handling of operations; eventually, everything
will be running better with little or no interruption in your schedule.

It's almost like reorganizing the company in small steps, as you go,
instead of having to formally engage in a massive, disruptive overhaul
that's jolting to everyone, usually expensive, and which often fails to
produce lasting value.

If you haven't set boundaries within your company, consider doing so.

_______________________________________________
Dataloss Mailing List (dataloss () datalossdb org)
Archived at http://seclists.org/dataloss/
Unsubscribe at http://lists.osvdb.org/mailman/listinfo/dataloss
For inquiries regarding use or licensing of data, e-mail
        sales () riskbasedsecurity com 

Supporters:

Risk Based Security (http://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/)
YourCISO is an affordable SaaS solution that provides a comprehensive information security program that ensures focus 
on the right security.  If you need security help or want to provide real risk reduction for your clients contact us!