The current economic and business situation that the industry is going through is forcing companies to create new business strategies.
by Luis González Nogales*
In the previous edition of this prestigious magazine we presented the exponential development that security activities and events had had in recent years; two months later we find a totally changed world, where all the events scheduled for these months of April, May and June 2020 are canceled and / or rescheduled and contact events through digital media such as webinars, teleconferences, online classes have multiplied.
All this product of a risk that was, according to some of the international experts of generally government agencies, possible to perceive and identify as a potential risk but that its assigned probability index was very low and therefore was not in the first line of action of measures to be developed, however when more than 40 million people were confined in China and their form of transmission and spread was known, most security analysts, apparently, did not update their probability indices and the alarms went off when the odds became fait accomplis, which brings us to the current situation of mass confinement, and a very likely economic setback without comparison with what has been known so far this century.
This new reality, which has no expiration date and is here to stay, forces us to ask ourselves many questions, some of which we will try to share in this space.
First of all this family of viruses known as coronavirus and whose predecessor was SARS and the current COVID-19, are here to stay, and just as we learned to live with AIDS, EBOLA, H1N1 we will have to adapt our way of life to live with these viruses; in time and space new treatments and vaccines will be developed that will return us to a daily life with a virus until this moment unknown, but just as we now live with cancer, diabetes and other chronic diseases it will be everyday life at last; I leave it to philosophers and social scholars whether it will be in a regime of greater, equal or lesser restrictions on personal intimacy and privacy.
Secondly, the business models of most sectors and industries, whether production or services, will change; and addressing the issue of this column, the models in which private security services are provided are bound to change.
How and how these business models will change is still a question and if some already have the answer they may not want to share it because they may have the black swan that will positively make them unique in the industry.
If we can infer some sectors that will undoubtedly have synergies, the manufacturers of electronic security equipment will have a significant absorption on the part of the communications companies as well as the service providers, a situation that had already been operating in some parts of the world, but that will undoubtedly be enhanced.
Electronic security equipment such as cameras, biometric readers and other detection equipment that interact with the human body will have synergies with body indicator detection systems such as heat, glucose, iris pigmentation, etc. And finally all these synergies of teams with health indicators will be processed by artificial intelligence that will assign indices of probabilities of carrying and contagion of the new and / or future pandemics. Some of these elements we have already seen in action in South Korea, for example.
Physical security with personnel will change to new capabilities that will have the guards, as has been developed today, which not only prevent the risks of theft, assault and others already known, but also take in many places the body temperature and indicate the obligation to comply with certain protocols of cleaning and personal disinfection of the hands, shoes, clothes and we still do not know what other future elements. This means a change in the academic status and new knowledge of staff, which is extended to supervisors, new protocols in control centers or command posts, as well as new qualities and capabilities for security managers and directors.
Finally, the necessary interconnection for these new business models based not only on the prevention of known risks and objects of study in the different prediction models in the probability of occurrence, but on the almost unknown risks or with very low probability indices known to be newly developed, whether the product of well-intentioned human actions or of nature, both for its evolutionary development and as a product of climate change that is affecting this natural evolution.
This interconnection will undoubtedly absorb the private security industry into an arm increasingly necessary for public security, due to its extension and territorial breadth, and in addition to giving it a sense of social recognition as an important part of the citizen security system in its broadest expression, it will also make that not only today the security guards or guards are part of that set of anonymous heroes who fight in the The first line of containment of the current pandemic, but must be incorporated as an indispensable and indissoluble part of the system that is developed for the well-being and security of humanity.
Greetings to all colleagues and readers of this magazine.
* Luis González Nogales is the Executive President of INCASPRI. If you want to contact him, you can write to the email: [email protected]
