You can read all the details on their website (except for the part about the certification not being a measure of practical skills). From what I can tell, the CSSLP is just the CISSP with different CBKs, or Common Bodies of Knowledge. As with the CISSP, they are going for broad knowledge, not depth. Starting in June 2009, you can get certified by taking a paper exam, likely a multiple choice test similar to the CISSP. Why June? Because the test isn’t even written yet — I’ve heard from several sources that they are actively soliciting their existing pool of CISSPs to help write test questions.

Ah, but what if you can’t wait that long and want to get certified right away? You’re in luck. If you act before March 31, 2009, you can get grandfathered in without even having to take the exam! That’s right, they call it the CSSLP Experience Assessment, and here are the requirements:

• Upload a resume showing three years of experience related to software security, or four years if you don’t have a college degree
• Write short essays (500 words maximum) discussing four CBKs of your choice
• Get a CISSP to vouch for you
• Pay $650

Let’s examine these requirements one at a time.

Three years of experience. (ISC)2 doesn’t provide any requirements on depth of experience, other than citing the broadly-defined CBKs. Considering they are targeting everyone from software developers to security assessors to business analysts (yes, really), chances are they are going to accept any experience that is even tangential to the SDLC or software security.

Short essays on four of the CBKs. I asked the (ISC)2 exhibitors specifically what they are looking for to satisfy this requirement, and they said the essays should be a general discussion of the CBK topic, optionally citing your personal experience in that area if you have any. This messaging is not quite aligned with the website guidance, which states that the essays should be “Accomplishment Records” which are self-reported descriptions of experience. Either way, with a maximum essay length of 500 words, it’s pretty obvious that substance is not (ISC)2’s first priority. Here’s one data point for you: I spoke to someone who has already submitted the CSSLP Experience Assessment, and he said it took about an hour to write the essays.

Get a CISSP to vouch for you. Actually this can be any (ISC)2 certified person, not just CISSPs. Contrary to what you’d expect, though, the person isn’t vouching for your skillset so much as they are confirming that the attestations on your resume are accurate.

Pay $650. You knew it was coming. After all, there is money to be made. How is it that qualifying for the CSSLP through professional experience should cost $650? If you’re taking the written exam, fair enough, (ISC)2 does incur the cost of administering and grading that exam (even though the Scantron machine is probably paid off by now). But $650 for the submitted-online Experience Assessment? If we assume that the person reading these essay submissions makes a rather generous $100k per year, then $650 accounts for roughly a day and a half. Will it really take that long to read a maximum of 2,000 words and pass judgment? Of course not. (ISC)2 wants to get as many people as possible to qualify based on “experience”, seeding the initial pool of CSSLPs and netting them $650 per head for doing next to nothing.

As Lee Kushner stated during his OWASP AppSec presentation (7 Habits of Highly Effective Career Managers), “the more people who own a cert, the less relevant it becomes.” Irrelevant — that’s exactly what the CISSP has become, and it’s exactly where the CSSLP is headed. Meanwhile, (ISC)2 will sit back and watch while you and your employers continue to fill their coffers.

In closing, let me acknowledge that this blog entry probably comes across as judgmental. I accept that. I’m not ranting against the idea of certifications, though admittedly I’m not a fan of them either. I am disappointed that (ISC)2, an organization with tremendous influence, could have created something more meaningful but chose not to. Why bother when people will just fork over the cash anyway?

I have to admit that I was already a fan of Collins’ quantitative style blended with clever insight, but this was the first time that I had seen him in person, and he was just spectacular. He has a vivid, animated way of telling a story, and had a great sense of humor. This combination of presentation skill was put to immediate use with his first statement drawing a hearty laugh from the audience full of entrepreneurs.

“How many of you in the room are constitutionally unemployable?”

Much of his remaining presentation provided interesting stories and insight from the research that he has done to understand the make-up of exceptional companies.

As Jim said, he has spent years studying the contrast between average companies and exceptional companies. They faced the same set of variables… similar economic conditions, similar competition for top human resources, and a similar set of huge unknowns.

What is the single biggest element of difference?

Not a function of the cards you are dealt, or circumstance… it is conscious choice and discipline.

Jim’s key principles & disciplines that have come from the studies we have worked on:

1. Building greatness is a cumulative never ending process! The idea that no matter how exceptional, you are always only relatively as good as to what you can do next.
2. Most overnight successes are 20 years in the making…. Wal-mart  took 13 years to get to 125 stores. Starbucks required 17 years to get to 38 stores.

“If you start to break Packard’s law, and there are very few laws of business, it is like breaking a law of physics for building great companies.” - David Packard (Co-founder of HP)

If you allow growth to exceed your ability to get enough of the right people to fill the key seats to execute on the growth brilliantly, you will fall as surely as a stone dropped from your hand. This is one of those timeless truths that extends beyond technology and economics.

The number one constraint on growth and sustained success…

An ability to get enough of the right people in the key seats to achieve that sustained growth.

The discipline that WHO comes before WHAT. Collins always kept coming back to the “who” thing over and over again. He said, “The more turbulent the world, (given the great current economic uncertainty of our financial system) the more important this issue is.”

A question from the audience came near the end of his session… How do you figure out who are the right people to put in key seats on the bus?

Collins responded with “Given that I stand here amidst a room full of unmotivated people… the right people are self motivated, self disciplined, self managed, The task is not to motivate unmotivated people, the task is not to have to manage people… self motivated, figured it out from there… self motivated people don’t need tons of management … when you have to start managing, you know that you have the wrong person at the task.”

Final thoughts:

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness is a function of conscious choice and discipline. It is not a matter of circumstance, it is one of choices.

I believe that every one of the Inc. 500 companies that I met at this conference achieved the list because they did not embrace the status quo. Incredible passion, an unwillingness to accept failure and an excessive and compulsive willingness to solve customer’s problems were key ingredients in the business building formula for the entrepreneurs that were at the conference.

Finding Zune-Fi: Ina Fried of News.com wanders the polite streets of San Francisco in search of Zune connections over Wi-Fi. She finds a few, and has a good experience. One cafe owner sees the ease with which she can stream music and calls it cool. She can't connect at the long-running Google-sponsored free Wi-Fi at Union Square, however, which means the Wi-Fi likely has an accept button that must be pressed. Surely Microsoft could insert a little technology that would allow a browser-free acceptance of terms? Probably involves Yet Another Protocol: the Wi-Fi Terms Browser-Free Presentation Protocol (WTBFPP).

Kodak adds interesting Wi-Fi enabled all-in-one: The new Kodak ESP 9 is a multi-function printer (fax, scan, print, copy) that connects to a network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. The $300 device spits out 30 pages per minutes in color, 32 ppm in black only. Kodak claims that the model line to which the ESP belongs uses ink in a vastly more efficient manner than the "average of comparable consumer inkjet printers."

In any case, if you do pentests, think about all the RECENT cases where you break in to a major corporation through:

• a Solaris system with Internet-exposed telnet with a guessable password OR a telnet vulnerability (circa 1994!)
• an exposed VPN appliance with a manufacturer's administrator password
• a router with default "enable" password
• or, something else entirely - but something that rivals the above example in its unparalleled, unbelievable, abysmal, deep idiocy.

Indeed, many of my pentesting friends still report plenty of such cases (one was also featured in the presentation mentioned above). Whenever I hear about it from a pentester, I always ask:

Do you think "somebody bad" had already passed through the hole you just discovered?

Maybe an hour ago, a day ago - or a year ago?!

I cannot see how the answer can be "no."

Even though pentesters usually don't focus on forensics (no time for this), it is not uncommon to notice "your predecessor's" intrusion traces while you break through systems, "plant flags", change screen backgrounds [for the admins to notice that you've been there...], etc.

Let's think what this situation really means? Here are the choices I see:

1. Nobody discovered the hole - a law of large  numbers (aka "dumb luck") have "shielded" the company from an incident. Yes, Virginia, dumb luck IS a security strategy for some companies... AND it works for them.
2. It was discovered, but not used/abused by the attacker - maybe he was busy hacking other systems, or saved this for later and never came back due to his ADD. Congratulation, you win! The immense power of dumb luck wrapped you in a protective "security" blanket ... again :-)
3. It was discovered; the attacker went in, looked around and compromised a few others systems, but found nothing of interest (no low hanging fruits)  - and he was not a bot herder. Again, you win. Next time you are in Vegas, bet on "00."
4. It was discovered; the attacker went in and deployed a bot on "your" system - given how many botnets are there, this situation is clearly acceptable to many organizations. In this case, dumb luck strategy, apparently, still work: so they use your box to spam and phish somebody else ... big deal!
5. It was discovered; the attacker went in and stole all your credit card information (it is now for sale) - even in this case, the user of "the dumb luck strategy" still "wins" (in some perverse sense)! Unless and until the stolen information IS tracked back to you OR a friendly neighborhood PCI auditor come and jams a broomstick up your ..., you can still continue to be stupid at your leisure and ignore basic security practices.
6. It was discovered; the attacker went in and stole your CEO's Inbox, including the email related to his affair (it is now on CNN) - now, in this case, you lose AND it is time to stop being stupid! Welcome to the "0wned world." Time to launch (relaunch?) your security program and get serious.

What does this teach us about RISK? The lesson here is important:

• For a security professional, an Internet-exposed system with "root/root" is an obvious HUGE risk!
• For your boss's boss's boss, it is NOT!

This is exactly why I think that the most critical problem in security today is METRICS. Metrics that a) work AND mean something to decision makers and b) can be clearly communicated to said decision makers [BTW, a) and b) are two separate problems.] Metrics that cover not only threats and vulnerabilities we face, but also the effectiveness of security countermeasures we deploy. Metrics you can act on - and ones your boss (and his boss) will act on. Metrics that lead to correct decisions about which risks to accept, which to  mitigate (all while knowing with what efficiency such mitigation occurs) and which to transfer.

Until that time, the dreaded "C-word" (compliance) will trump "the other C-word" (common sense) as a driver for security ... and we will continue to live in the "0wned world."

Possibly related posts:

• Risk vs Risk 

• Moderator: Jim Metzler, Vice President, Ashton, Metzler & Associates
• Rowan Snyder, CIO, KPMG
• David Michael, CIO, United Business Media Group
• Joanna Young, Chief Information Officer, Corporate Information Systems & Enterprise Services, Liberty Mutual

Jim: Is the CIO a technical job anymore? For example, inside Liberty there are business projects with an IT component.

Joanna: We are organized to partner with internal business clients or vendors who provide objectives and business requirements. We strive to figure out the smallest amount of an IT investment we can make to get this to work.

Rowan: We have both. Part of the dilemma is that the thing that sells the best is fear. I don’t want to use that to get business.

Joanna: One good example is security from an application perspective. It’s hard to talk about security investments in business terms. We put it into terms like “this is what it will cost us if we DON’T do this.” For example, a solution for spam required us to do research into what it was costing us overall. Once we put it together, the business was all for it. You have to put your business hat on and think “how can I make this important for a businessperson?” If you can’t, you may need to ask yourself why you’re pushing services on them that they may not need.

Jim: Can you give us insight into business-IT alignment? What about governance?

Rowan: Governance is the hardest part of IT. It’s not like the technology is easy. If it’s a business project with an IT component, I don’t usually get involved. It comes down to overall budget. The infrastructure we own and let people know exactly what it will cost to do it. We are a distributed IT firm, there are multiple groups. This is the most distributed and risk-prone organization I’ve worked in. It can be difficult for the business to exert control. It demonstrates risk, in security, compliance, methodologies, etc.

Joanna: Governance has become a word that nobody wants to use. It suddenly implies that IT is the holder of all the money and they are the ones that get to decide. We stopped using that word and position IT as a strategic business partner.

David: We have a highly decentralized IT set-up. We have about 600 globally and around 40 in the headquarters. We have 10 CIOs for each division, and within each division it is decentralized. We try to run each unit as autonomous. This is a close alignment with IT and business. However, then the problem of how do you have commonality between divisions and collaboration?

Jim: How can you minimize risk in distributed environment using standards and procedures?

David: The reality is it can be impractical for an organization. You end up with a patchwork of platforms and technologies. We have to accept that we’ll have multiple solutions. We can attempt to push a standard, but overall have a much more relaxed approach to manage everything. There is a lot of equality between divisions in what they can choose to purchase.

Joanna: Standards are easier to apply the further down the staff you are. The most important thing with any of this is to understand why you are making the decisions. If there is a process and pros and cons are identified, there is a clear record of why decisions were made.

Audience Poll: Everyone raised their hand that MORE standards were needed.

Audience Question: Are there inefficiencies in the data center in terms of energy and green IT? What are you doing about it?

Joanna: Everyone focuses on cars for carbon footprints. But, it’s really buildings…and then data centers. The data center has the same importance as any other efficiency. They need to be running as cheaply as possible. Corporations have a responsibility to make sure they are energy efficient.

Rowan: We recently did a carbon footprint analysis, and found that half of carbon comes from electricity, with half of that from the data center.

David: Every company does have a responsibility to look at its carbon emission globally. Consider international travel, flying, etc. As much as possible, we are not building data centers. We are using other people’s data centers in an effort to get out of the data center business.

Audience Question: How do you balance the good from standards with agile development and possible roadblocks?

Joanna: Luckily agile development is under the CIO’s control. You can see the lifecycle and savings that occur. When I look, I check what the standards are that I’m measuring by.

Jim: Does web 2.0 have any business meaning in your environment? If so, what are you doing about it?

Joanna: I’ve been in IT for 20 years. It’s another component to business IT investment, and has to be presented as such. As IT professionals we have a responsibility to identify what Web 2.0 is, and then translate to see if there is anything the company should be doing with it. Monitor it based on your current portfolio, and consider its impact.

David: It’s pretty important to our business as a media company. I don’t think it means one thing, it’s a term people use to talk about the web and what’s going on online. From mobile, to ajax, cloud computing or mashups - you can draw multiple conclusions. More and more business is being done online. We have a lot of growth opportunities online.

Rowan: Compliance, security, and privacy issues just explode with Web 2.0.

It's become a big deal in IT security, too. Many corporate customers are demanding ROI models to demonstrate that a particular security investment pays off. And in response, vendors are providing ROI models that demonstrate how their particular security solution provides the best return on investment.

It's a good idea in theory, but it's mostly bunk in practice.

Before I get into the details, there's one point I have to make. "ROI" as used in a security context is inaccurate. Security is not an investment that provides a return, like a new factory or a financial instrument. It's an expense that, hopefully, pays for itself in cost savings. Security is about loss prevention, not about earnings. The term just doesn't make sense in this context.

But as anyone who has lived through a company's vicious end-of-year budget-slashing exercises knows, when you're trying to make your numbers, cutting costs is the same as increasing revenues. So while security can't produce ROI, loss prevention most certainly affects a company's bottom line.

And a company should implement only security countermeasures that affect its bottom line positively. It shouldn't spend more on a security problem than the problem is worth. Conversely, it shouldn't ignore problems that are costing it money when there are cheaper mitigation alternatives. A smart company needs to approach security as it would any other business decision: costs versus benefits.

The classic methodology is called annualized loss expectancy (ALE), and it's straightforward. Calculate the cost of a security incident in both tangibles like time and money, and intangibles like reputation and competitive advantage. Multiply that by the chance the incident will occur in a year. That tells you how much you should spend to mitigate the risk. So, for example, if your store has a 10 percent chance of getting robbed and the cost of being robbed is $10,000, then you should spend $1,000 a year on security. Spend more than that, and you're wasting money. Spend less than that, and you're also wasting money.

Of course, that $1,000 has to reduce the chance of being robbed to zero in order to be cost-effective. If a security measure cuts the chance of robbery by 40 percent -- to 6 percent a year -- then you should spend no more than $400 on it. If another security measure reduces it by 80 percent, it's worth $800. And if two security measures both reduce the chance of being robbed by 50 percent and one costs $300 and the other $700, the first one is worth it and the second isn't.

The Data Imperative

The key to making this work is good data; the term of art is "actuarial tail." If you're doing an ALE analysis of a security camera at a convenience store, you need to know the crime rate in the store's neighborhood and maybe have some idea of how much cameras improve the odds of convincing criminals to rob another store instead. You need to know how much a robbery costs: in merchandise, in time and annoyance, in lost sales due to spooked patrons, in employee morale. You need to know how much not having the cameras costs in terms of employee morale; maybe you're having trouble hiring salespeople to work the night shift. With all that data, you can figure out if the cost of the camera is cheaper than the loss of revenue if you close the store at night -- assuming that the closed store won't get robbed as well. And then you can decide whether to install one.

Cybersecurity is considerably harder, because there just isn't enough good data. There aren't good crime rates for cyberspace, and we have a lot less data about how individual security countermeasures -- or specific configurations of countermeasures -- mitigate those risks. We don't even have data on incident costs.

One problem is that the threat moves too quickly. The characteristics of the things we're trying to prevent change so quickly that we can't accumulate data fast enough. By the time we get some data, there's a new threat model for which we don't have enough data. So we can't create ALE models.

But there's another problem, and it's that the math quickly falls apart when it comes to rare and expensive events. Imagine you calculate the cost -- reputational costs, loss of customers, etc. -- of having your company's name in the newspaper after an embarrassing cybersecurity event to be $20 million. Also assume that the odds are 1 in 10,000 of that happening in any one year. ALE says you should spend no more than $2,000 mitigating that risk.

So far, so good. But maybe your CFO thinks an incident would cost only $10 million. You can't argue, since we're just estimating. But he just cut your security budget in half. A vendor trying to sell you a product finds a Web analysis claiming that the odds of this happening are actually 1 in 1,000. Accept this new number, and suddenly a product costing 10 times as much is still a good investment.

It gets worse when you deal with even more rare and expensive events. Imagine you're in charge of terrorism mitigation at a chlorine plant. What's the cost to your company, in money and reputation, of a large and very deadly explosion? $100 million? $1 billion? $10 billion? And the odds: 1 in a hundred thousand, 1 in a million, 1 in 10 million? Depending on how you answer those two questions -- and any answer is really just a guess -- you can justify spending anywhere from $10 to $100,000 annually to mitigate that risk.

Or take another example: airport security. Assume that all the new airport security measures increase the waiting time at airports by -- and I'm making this up -- 30 minutes per passenger. There were 760 million passenger boardings in the United States in 2007. This means that the extra waiting time at airports has cost us a collective 43,000 years of extra waiting time. Assume a 70-year life expectancy, and the increased waiting time has "killed" 620 people per year -- 930 if you calculate the numbers based on 16 hours of awake time per day. So the question is: If we did away with increased airport security, would the result be more people dead from terrorism or fewer?

Caveat Emptor

This kind of thing is why most ROI models you get from security vendors are nonsense. Of course their model demonstrates that their product or service makes financial sense: They've jiggered the numbers so that they do.

This doesn't mean that ALE is useless, but it does mean you should 1) mistrust any analyses that come from people with an agenda and 2) use any results as a general guideline only. So when you get an ROI model from your vendor, take its framework and plug in your own numbers. Don't even show the vendor your improvements; it won't consider any changes that make its product or service less cost-effective to be an "improvement." And use those results as a general guide, along with risk management and compliance analyses, when you're deciding what security products and services to buy.

This essay previously appeared in CSO Magazine.

“Event processing has been going on for more than fifty years.”

However, in On Event Processing as a Discipline and Some Subsets another colleague mistakenly blogs,

“… people who dealt in this area [network management and event correlation] have never investigated event processing in the larger sense (e.g. looking at additional patterns), and this area has also not spawned the event processing discipline.”

If you examine just one page from the CEP history at Stanford, researchers there outlined their view of the future applications for CEP, as follows:

• Instant Insight  - hierarchical event viewing applied to the Enterprise IT layer.
  • Analysing business processes
• Network Level Monitoring and Management
• Cyber Security: Network Intrusion Detection
• Enterprise Monitoring and Management
• Modeling and Simulation of Collaborative Business Processes
• Business Policy Monitoring
• Analysis and Debugging of Distributed Systems

These applications areas mentioned by Stanford researchers, including Professor Luckham, support and validate our recent discussion Magic Quadrant for IT Event Correlation and Analysis, 2007 where we concluded that “event correlation and event analysis is Gartner’s closest magic quadrant (MQ)  [...] relates directly to complex event processing (and event processing in general).”  

If you take a detailed look at the 1999 CEP presentation, Defeating Large Scale Attacks: Technology and Strategies for Global Network Monitoring you will readily see that our colleagues are incorrect when they says that event correlational and network management folks have never investigated event processing in the “larger sense”.  For example, the 1999 slides above, Stanford, slide 6, is titled “Complex Event Processing,” defining CEP from the application perspective of event correlation;

Complex Event Processing

• Accept network ‘events’ from any source
  • CISCO NetFlow FlowCollector, tcpdump
• Correlates events based on content and temporal relationship between events
• Event Processing Agents (EPAs) connected in an Event Processing Network (EPNs)
• Both post-mortem and real-time processing

This single event correlational project example from David’s team at Stanford examined the challenging event correlation problems in the context of hierarchical events, maps, patterns, visualization tools, event processing models, patterns languages, network management abstraction layers, and more.  Those core event processing problems from this 1999 example, very large and complex then, still exist today and are much more large and complex - precisely why it is called “complex event processing.”

It is quite obvious, in just this one example, that many folks have been looking at event correlation as a motivating application for event processing, in a larger context, for a long time, contrary to what our colleagues write in their “history of event processing” posts.  

In a future post I will completely debuke these event processing “history revisionists.”   I will illustrate very clearly how the history of event processing goes back at least a decade, and perhaps two (twenty years) before the history outlined in posts like On Research and Practice in Event Processing and The History of Complex Event Processing. 

David Luckam stated that the art-and-science of event processing goes back around 50 years. 

I am not sure I will go all the way back to 1960 in my next post on the history of event processing.  However,  I will go back at least to the early days of Internet Protocol (IP) networking and illustrate why distributed IP networking, network management and network security, is one of the key  motivating factors for what we now call “event processing” and “complex event processing.”

HANSEI - WHAT IS “RELENTLESS REFLECTION?” - And why we’re talking about it in the context of Risk Analysis.

Recall from yesterday’s post about how I got to thinking about the concept of Hansei-Kaizen, “relentless reflection” and “continuous improvement” and how we might apply that to risk management.  It’s a concept born of Toyota and is, in some way, the foundation for “Lean” production.

Call me biased, but I think that Hansei - the act of ‘relentless reflection’ made structured is the analytical function.  And I hate to debate (post-mortem) the father of Toyota quality success when he says that Hansei is the “check” in Plan/Do/Check/Act, but I think that Hansei also applies to the “Plan” of the P/D/C/A or Deming cycle.

You’ll recall the P/D/C/A cycle can be thought of even as an implementation of Scientific Method, in that it is Observation & Hypothesis Creation (P), Experiment (D), Analysis (Check), and Act (Revise/New Hypothesis, etc…).  Well then as such, the Hypothesis creation involves creating a model or creating an expected outcome for data using the currently accepted model.

So in our industry there is an opportunity for Relentless Reflection in both the Observation and Hypothesis (Plan) creation steps, and the Check step.  We create an estimate for control strength, or probable losses in the context of risk- then we go to Experiment step.  That hypothesis can be put it into production, have an audit, have a penetration test, whatever, in the context of the Do step.  BTW - using Hansei/Analytics in Plan is one way that strong analytical functions can really make penetration testing more useful - as a means to test the estimates and inputs into a model.  It’s Penetration Testing 2.0!  (<- tongue fully in cheek, yes)

Those who are versed in the reasons to merge Six Sigma and Lean together are probably already seeing where I’m going with this today.  But before you think that a simple DMAIC function is all that is needed to create proper “Hansei”, let me encourage you to keep reading.

Now if the analytical function can said to be “reflection”, why must it be relentless?

One word.  Change. There are essentially four separate “landscapes” or sources of change that we face (more on those tomorrow).  But anyone who has tried to manage system compliance, log management or policy exceptions knows that change is possibly the most difficult thing we security professionals must manage.  And when you think about it, there aren’t too many other business functions like information security where significant visibility and insight about the environment is needed for “complete” information (get bullish on Log Management is my recommendation).

HANSEI STEPS ADAPTED TO INFORMATION SECURITY

This is one of those quality control concepts that we can mangle adopt.  At Toyota, Hansei-Kaizen includes the following basic steps:

1. Initial problem perception
2. Clarify the problem
3. Locate area/point of cause
4. Investigate root cause (using an ask why 5 times approach)
5. Countermeasure
6. Evaluate
7. Standardize

Now it’s important to note that part of this includes the concept of Go See For Yourself, called “Gemba“.  Gemba can be translated as “the actual place” or “the place where virtue or truth is found.” At Toyota this might mean going to the shop floor to see the issue at hand in the production line.  But for us, that’s a problem because we live in the virtual world.  There’s usually not much use in hanging out in the wiring closets to try to see the problems.

But if you combine the concept of Gemba with the concept of “Nemawashi” –the process of discussing problems and potential solutions with all those affected- we can forge a similar concept using risk analysis.  That is discussing the issue and the risk associated with an issue (what some people would call “risk management”) with the business/LOB/data owner and let them accept authority and the risk decision.  We, the risk analyst, our goal is simply to perform items 1-5 (presenting countermeasure options that include transferring or accepting risk).  By going to the line of business and involving them, responsibility is shared.  Also, if you structure organizational behavior right, personal risk is transferred!

This sort of approach is also in harmony with concepts like “mutual ownership of problems,” or “genchi genbutsu,” (solving problems at the source instead of behind desks), and the “kaizen mind,” (an unending sense of crisis behind the company’s constant drive to improve).

One of the criticisms I have with the way most people try to implement DMAIC into “Lean”

REQUIREMENTS

Now to get this done, I really see three significant requirements.

1.)  A change in political structure.

2.)  Models that provide consistent, defensible analysis.

3.)  A Quantitative approach.  This means using actual units of measurement (not just amorphous percents, ordinal scales, etc.)  for risk and it’s subsequent factors.  Sure there are times when Q&D qualitative approaches are acceptable, but policy should be to have quantitative analysis whenever and wherever possible.

That last item - the quantitative approach - is really quite important.  And the reasons why will be discussed further in tomorrow’s post:

“What should we be reflecting about? & What is needed for reflection?”

P.S.  Your comments and suggestions, as always, are welcome.

P.P.S  Those who may be familiar with Lean/SixSigma/Kaizen sorts of mashups may be thinking - “hey, an Analytical step is built into SixSigma”.  Well, yes there is some prevision for analytical functions based on statistics, but I find SixSigma geared towards creating a State of Knowledge about operational processes, not towards creating a State of Wisdom for CISO’s around security & risks “big questions”.  In otherwords, the analytical function in DMAIC is in the context of Kaizen, and a different step than “reflective” analytics.