CSO to the rescue?

Jun 1, 2002 12:00 PM, Larry Anderson

Have you ever met a CSO? Maybe you are performing the duties of a CSO and didn't even know it. Or maybe you should apply for a new job as a CSO. It could well be that your next boss will be a CSO.

For the uninitiated, this newly-emerging abbreviation stands for chief security officer, and lately it has joined the ranks of CEO, CFO, CIO, et. al. in the alphabet-soup of high-level corporate executives.

How is a CSO different from a corporate security director, the more common designation for the top security professional at a corporation? We're not sure, but it has a lot to do with clout.

The CSO would have broad-based responsibilities for every aspect of a corporation's security interests, spanning from physical security to information security — from the fences and doors that keep the business safe to the firewalls, encryption and other tools that keep cyber-criminals at bay. He would be called on to look at the big picture, to communicate at the highest levels of the corporation, in the language of corporate-speak, and to make decisions based on an informed and analytical assessment of the corporation's needs. The New York Times suggests the job description involves “roughly equal parts top cop, business manager and computer geek.”

It sounds like the job description for a corporate security director. More importantly, it describes what the job of corporate security director should be.

The implication is that a CSO would be a higher-level person than a corporate security director — the use of initials including C and O are reserved for the highest-level, most well-paid managers of the organization. Certainly, the designation suggests an unprecedented claim by security to a seat at the head table of an organization. Creating a new super-high-level initial to designate a new person with broad security authority serves to indicate how important security has become in the last several months.

To the extent that three letters — CSO — can raise the status and prominence of the discipline at hand — security — we couldn't be more pleased.

But when bringing in new executive manpower, let's be careful not to imply that existing security personnel have been somehow inadequate. Security professionals across the country have engaged for years in a hard-fought effort to get corporate America to listen up and face up to security issues. They have articulated their concerns, made sound decisions and managed effectively with the resources they were given. If security issues didn't make it up the corporate ladder, or having made it up the ladder, if they were ignored, the security director wasn't to blame.

Let's be careful that creation of a new corporate-level job doesn't turn into a way to pay lip-service to something that was ignored for years. Even today, if organizations would just listen to their security people and make wise choices based on what they hear, it could turn out that the benefits to be derived from appointing a CSO can be achieved within a corporation's current structure, without having to add another corner office to the executive suite.

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