It’s Time to Improve School Security

For comprehensive school safety best practices, facility leaders are encouraged to consult The Partner Alliance for Safer Schools (PASS). This organization provides the most thorough information on securing school facilities. PASS recommends beginning with a self-assessment to evaluate your current campus situation. From there, explore ways to integrate these security strategies into your existing layers of campus safety and security.

Repeated Intelligence Failures – Not Connecting the Dots

Like 9/11, evidence suggests intelligence failures occurred during Pearl Harbor, the Boston Marathon Bombing, the bombing of the USS Cole, multiple active assailant attacks, and other incidents. These intelligence failures attain exponential levels of concern and consequence when they occur on a national level. Often associated with such events is the criticism that there was a “failure to connect the dots.” Most recently, some have questioned if there was an intelligence failure (i.e., failure to connect the dots) before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel.

NEW BOOK: Mind the Tech Gap Addressing the Conflicts between IT and Security Teams

IT and cybersecurity teams have had a long-standing battle between functionality and security. But why? To understand where the problem lies, author Nikki Robinson explores the different job functions, goals, relationships, and other factors that may impact how IT and cybersecurity teams interact. With different levels of budget, competing goals, and a history of lack of communication, there is a lot of work to do to bring these teams together.

Empathy and emotional intelligence are common phenomena discussed in leadership books, so why not at the practitioner level? Technical teams are constantly juggling projects, engineering tasks, risk management activities, security configurations, remediating audit findings, and the list goes on. Understanding how psychology and human factors engineering practices can improve both IT and cybersecurity teams can positively impact those relationships, as well as strengthen both functionality and security.