IBM Report Details New Strategy for Homeland Security and Commerce in a Networked Economy

Recommendations for Improved Resilience, Performance, and Security in Public and Private Sector Operations



WASHINGTON, DC .-IBM (NYSE: IBM) today released a report outlining new risks to people, cargo, global financial and information flows, and modes of transport. The report highlights the complexity and vulnerability of these systems, and provides recommendations for the future.

Based on research and interviews with more than 200 former and current government officials and policy experts, “Global Movement Management: Strengthening Commerce, Security and Resiliency in Today’s Networked World,” provides detailed recommendations for policymakers, companies, and governments to enhance global economic security and resiliency. The authors challenge public and private organizations to focus on key similarities in their operations and to align their policies and investments in a way that makes performance, security and resiliency a joint effort.

“Our findings indicate that a better understanding of emerging risks makes it possible to improve security and resilience without harming commercial interests,” according to W. Scott Gould, Vice President Public Sector Strategy, IBM Global Business Services. “More than ever, governments and businesses need to work together to strengthen critical economic flows -- immigration, cybersecurity, travel, transportation, cargo -- against the risks they face in a world characterized by globalization, technology change, and mutual interdependence.”

Presenting a new approach that can guide the formation of policies, plans, and implementation efforts, the report introduces three key ideas:

* Intelligent Immunity - Make critical economic systems more resistant to disruption through a strategy built on resilience that addresses terrorism and other threats to global economic systems. Security policies need to do more than simply prevent attacks; the best security policies will allow organizations to isolate disruptions and recover from them quickly.

* Strategic Human Capital - Transform the relationships between individuals and their organizations to enhance the individual employee’s understanding of his or her role in improving performance and reducing risk. Empowering front-line employees through strategic investments in training and education can be the best defense that many organizations have against the threats they face.

* Leverage Data and Skills Through Technology - Build technologies that ensure that people have the right information at the right time to do their jobs better and to keep their organizations secure. New tools and standards for information sharing and privacy protection will be required to help these new technologies become as cost effective and ubiquitous as web browsers and HTML were for the development of the worldwide web.

The report addresses how risk has changed in the 21st century, noting that today, technology and globalization allow individuals and individual events to create disruptions and damage on a scale never before seen. As a result, organizations are increasingly faced with the need for dramatic changes in the level of information sharing and public and private collaboration.

In addition, the authors call attention to the lack of sufficient international coordination to make economic systems more secure and resilient. Their findings suggest that a new effort is needed to energize and provide direction for governance efforts. Such an initiative would augment the efforts of existing security and commerce organizations around the world, while creating a leading new forum for public and private cooperation.

The report is available on www.ibm.com, and is authored by IBM strategy consultants W. Scott Gould, Vice President, Public Sector Strategy, Daniel B. Prieto, Vice President, Homeland Security and Jonah J. Czerwinski, Managing Consultant, Homeland Security.