Improving their efficiency, being leaders and creating added value, are functions that organizations must perform to be competitive in the global environment.
A fraternal greeting from Puerto Rico to all colleagues and readers of this column! It is a pleasure to share again with you.
by Héctor R. Torres, PhD, MBA, CPP, CFE
In this edition, we will talk about corporate security and strategic change in organizations. To begin with, we must ask ourselves: what is strategic change and what is the role of corporate security in its implementation?
One of the biggest challenges that organizations will face at the beginning of the twenty-first century will be to remain competitive in a global business environment characterized as a volatile and constantly changing one. In the global business environment, organizations have to produce and deliver their products or services quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost than their rivals. To remain competitive in this type of environment, companies have to execute strategic change quickly, smoothly and with a lot of innovation.
The importance of innovation lies in the development of innovative methods to implement strategic change in an organization. The key or end result of such change is to be able to adapt the organization to its global business environment. To understand these concepts we must ask ourselves what is strategic change?
Strategic Change
Strategic change can be seen as the organization aligns with its external environment. Alignment with the external environment can be defined as the deployment of present and future resources of the organization and their interaction with the external environment. Alignment is based on two groups or types of changes. The first group is based on the content of the organization's strategy defined by scope, resource deployment, competitive advantages and organizational synergy.
The second group is based on the changes that occur in the external environment and how these are used to implement transformations in the context of the organization's strategy. This leads us to ask what role does corporate security play in strategic change? We must also ask ourselves how does corporate security help in the implementation of strategic change?
Corporate Security: Catalytic of Strategic Change
We have already established that twenty-first century organizations will have to implement strategic change to better compete and adapt to the global environment. However, strategic change in organizations is not just about achieving a better competitive position or adapting to the global environment. This is based on the creation of added value in its operations.
In this context, this change creates added value through the restructuring and reengineering of its processes to align and achieve a better competitive position. To carry out restructuring and reengineering processes, organizations must use and maximize all their resources based on the long-term future vision of what they need to become. One of these resources in organizations is that of corporate security.
In previous writings we had defined that the added value in a managerial function comprises actions that increase profits, improve organizational efficiency and develop a competitive advantage for institutions.
Corporate security in many organizations is in an excellent position to create added value in their functions to assist in alignment with the global environment, through restructuring and reengineering their own management processes. It's a matter of aligning your processes to achieve the organization's future vision and support organizational change. Your alignment should be focused on helping to improve profits, organizational efficiency, and develop a competitive advantage for organizations. By doing this, corporate security becomes a strategic element within organizations that contributes the added value to successfully adapt them to their global environment.
The times of doing security to do it have passed. We must be more proactive in seeking to cope with the managerial function of corporate security at a more strategic level. To achieve this goal, those of us who practice this security have to go beyond realizing the basic managerial scope of security and turn the managerial function of security into a strategic instrument for the organizations we serve.
In the next edition, we will talk about the efforts of the American Society for Industrial Security-International (ASIS) to create a standard for the corporate security officer in global organizations. This new standard will define and establish the position of the security manager as one with a more strategic focus.
I invite you to continue to share your ideas and concerns of the world and security management. A hug and see you next time!
If you wish you can write to the author at the email: [email protected]
