“Persuading Senior Management with Effective, Evaluated Security Metrics” is the culmination of a multi-year research project funded by the ASIS Foundation following work done by the ASIS Defense and Intelligence Council. The main purpose of the project was to develop a tool that will help security professionals evaluate and improve their metrics and use them to demonstrate return on investment as well as alignment with organizational goals. 

According to the Executive Summary in the report, without compelling metrics, security professionals and their budgets are left to the intuition of company executives. “With metrics, the security function grounds itself on measurable results that correlate with investment, and the security professional can speak to leadership in a familiar business language,” the report notes.

The ASIS Foundation awarded a grant in spring 2013 to Global Skills X-change (GSX), partnered with Ohlhausen Research, to carry out the project. The research project produced a database of selected security metrics and guidelines for effective use of security metrics to inform and persuade senior management.

The research project and the new metrics tool will be reviewed at an education session, “Security Metrics: Leveraging Performance Measures to Gain Efficiencies and Demonstrate Return on Investment,” on Tuesday 30 September as part of the ASIS International 60th Annual Seminar and Exhibits (ASIS 2014) at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Ga., to be held 29 September-02 October.

 Download the report from www.asisfoundation.org/secbiz.