Business Plan For A Security Company In Dubai

University: Bucks New University

Introduction:

Introduction to Enterprise Enterprises thrive due to many factors; desirable products, effective marketing, blindly optimistic and wealthy investors, dynamic working cultures and, of course...good leadership and motivated employees. Nevertheless, in all likelihood, a business can truly only survive in the longer-term by remaining vigilant and insightful of – and adaptive to - its operating environment. This includes keeping a careful and respectful eye on similar organisations within it. The security sector is perhaps more fragile than others. Services and consultancies are in many cases contracted, licensed or regulated by Governments and public authorities.
Perversely, this means projects or administrative regimes can be uprooted or radically changed at short notice, possibly due to public pressure or changes in ministerial personnel. Moreover, commercial security and risk services are often, by their very nature, focused around delivery into higher-risk (and therefore, potentially, higher profile) domains.
Experience tells us, that, either to avert, or following a major crisis, Governments will often insist that direct control of a scenario or problematic sector needs to be established. Such inconsistencies within the operating environment in addition to the routine challenges around finance and management, vex security enterprises in all theatres of the world. Sudden changes within the operating environment can thus cause damaging impacts to security enterprises and their clients. Equally, such situational and market volatility does also provide the most fantastic range of opportunities for security enterprises to excel, engage and expand in all theatres of the globe.
Examples of changes in the strategic political or local operating environment that may either slowly, or more immediately, impact security enterprises – or give the initial impression that they may do so - are manifold. I will begin by citing FOUR very random examples of what might be dubbed strategic (and operational) ‘gamechangers’ within a commercial environment for any security consultancy:
1. The introduction of British troops into Northern Ireland in 1969 to separate warring factions, and provide protection for civilians, following the escalation of sectarian and terrorist violence in Northern Ireland, and concerns at the neutrality of some public services 

2. The shooting and killing of several citizens in Iraq by a handful of employees working for Blackwater in 2007. This led to the ejection of that company from Iraq by the government, a clamp down on foreign private security contractors in country. It also acted as a catalyst for the ‘Montreux Document’: International Code of Conduct (ICoC) for Private Security Service Providers which was codified into an auditable guidance system by ASIS: Management System for the Quality of Private Security Company Operations (ANSI/ASIS PSC 2012)

3. The establishment of the Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF) by President Hamid Karzai’s administration following his declaration in 2010 that all Private Security Contractors will be disbanded and services provided direct by the APPF.

4. The last-minute decision by the UK government to deploy several thousand armed forces personnel to guard the London 2012 Olympics; the British Security Industry Authority had warned about significant potential shortfalls more than two years beforehand.

How can we effectively and professionally illustrate the Operating Environment?
Your answers to the above ‘reflective exercise’ might emanate from your own models and methods of evaluating an operating environment. But, for all of us, as we begin this module it is worth familiarising ourselves with the core business environment analysis models: 

-Porters Five Forces: Developed by Michael Porter. The five competitive forces in an industry… entry costs, potential new entrants, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, rivalry among current competitors (Porter: 1980: 4).
Companies and other organisations often also utilise the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) and Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological,`Legal and Environmental (PESTLE) models in an attempt to utilise intelligence and present sometimes complex risks within the framework of a universal methodology that the businesses can easily absorb and assimilate.
SWOT analysis is credited to Albert Humphrey and has been in use for almost fifty years. In particular, it uses opportunities and threats to examine external factors and it is these external factors that are important here. PESTLE is credited to Francis Aguilar’s 1967 model. It is effectively used to consider the macro environmental influences that affect an organisation. Therefore, these management models can be considered effective and wellknown to represent and coherently structure a broad suite of intelligence findings to an organisation. Such information could, for instance, presented quarterly at business unit updates and planning sessions where it is offered to chief executives and C-suite decisionmakers.
These analytical models are widely established. But often, because we feel we are familiar with them, we don’t carry out the analysis in the systematic manner required for them to work. The psychology model of learning takes us ‘experts’ to stage four: ‘unconscious competence’! This is where we feel we can act almost on ‘autopilot’ and our actions become intuitive rather than reflective and analytical. This is perhaps the most dangerous mind-set that an entrepreneur can move into. Therefore, even if you are familiar with the business analysis models above, we urge you to spend a little time refreshing your knowledge by reading about them on any good business or industry website .

Competitive Intelligence
“Competitive Intelligence is not an invention of the 20th century. CI has been around as long as business itself. It may have operated under a different name or under no name at all, but it was always present. Just review the story surrounding 19th century British financier Nathan Rothschild, who managed to corner the market on British government securities by receiving early warning of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. He used carrier pigeons, the Email of his day. He knew the information to watch and how to make sense of it; in the end, he used this intelligence to make a killing in the market.” (Leonard Fuld, What is Competitive Intelligence? 2013) CI has alternately been known as ‘competitor intelligence’ (although this is just one subdiscipline) and gained a grounding in American business journals half a century ago. The overall purpose can plausibly be summed as a various set of sub-systems woven together – to a greater or lesser extent – within a corporate body in order to provide an organisation with ‘competitive advantage’ over others in the field.
Lots of content exists from management journals and institutes to help us establish more precisely what CI physically is not, and we will reflect upon some core work in this sphere later.

“Customers, suppliers, substitutes and potential entrants are all “competitors” to firms in the industry and may be more or less prominent depending on the circumstances. Competition in this broader sense might be termed extended rivalry.”
An important document emerged in 2008 that attempted to pull together the range of definitions and parameters set by CI practitioners and academics. The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals published a definition in its Journal:
“… a necessary, ethical business discipline for decision making based on understanding the competitive environment.” The Journal’s former editor, Stephen Miller (2001), also describes CI as a positive corporate
business function:
“CI enables managers in companies of all sizes to make decisions about everything from marketing, R&D, and investing tactics to long term business strategies”. Perhaps we can conclude the following meanings about the term Competitive Intelligence:
-That its focus is on the external business environment
-That there is some form of process involved, or established business function/s, whereby information and knowledge is gathered and processed into an ‘intelligence product’.
-The provision of an Early Warning System to upcoming major market changes or incidents One very prominent thought-leader within the CI field is Leonard Fuld who has been a driving force behind pushing CI into established industry and academic practice. Fuld produced a widely read book in 2006 - The Secret Language of Competitive Intelligence - 

which underscored his primacy in this sphere. In his 2013 article ‘What is Competitive Intelligence? Fuld firmly established ten principles of what competitive intelligence is, and is not. Fuld maintains that CI is:
-Competitive Intelligence is Information that has been analyzed to the point where you can make a decision.
-Competitive Intelligence is a tool to alert management to early warning of both threats and opportunities.
-Competitive Intelligence is a means to deliver reasonable assessments.
-Competitive Intelligence comes in many flavors [sic]
-Competitive Intelligence is a way for companies to improve their bottom line.
-Competitive Intelligence is a way of life, a process.
-Competitive Intelligence is part of all best-in-class companies
-Competitive Intelligence is directed from the executive suite
-Competitive Intelligence is seeing outside yourself
-Competitive Intelligence is both short- and long-term

In a survey of life science executives, Fuld introduced his White Paper findings pertinently:
“Many of today’s companies and their executives strikingly resemble the boiling frog. They remain comfortable though the surrounding environment is changing, sometimes fatally, for their enterprises. Business history is littered with disruptions that upend or bankrupt many key players.”
In the digital era, with global interconnectedness, and greater commercial pressures for transparency and anatomical information, Open Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT) has become big business. Unfortunately, the line between legitimate intelligence activities and economic espionage is sometimes crossed. This is discussed in the Protection of Assets (PoA) Manual, (Allison, 2008), ‘As Michael D. Moberly, former chairman of the ASIS
International Information Asset Protection Council notes (2006):
“An unfortunate reality of international business transactions is that the probability that a company will…experience some form…of infringement, misappropriation, counterfeiting, or product piracy is growing.”
It goes on to site numerous historical examples, including the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses, the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and the Byzantine Emperor Justinian amongst others, of breaches of what is referred to as ‘Information Asset Protection’ (IAP). (Allison, 2008), The PoA continues by recommending the adoption of a risk management approach which starts with identifying assets to be protected.

Case study: Hewlett Packard; the company where competitive intelligence went too far
A company that is a prime example of how intelligence gathering activities can cross the boundary of what is legal and permissible is the IT hardware manufacturer, Hewlett-Packard (HP).
HP, based in Palo Alto, Calif., was founded in 1939 by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard …Today HP operates in more than 170 countries and is ranked…on Fortune magazine’s Fortune 500. Before the spy scandal came to light, the
company also was known in the industry for its integrity.’ (Society of American Business Editors and Writers [SABEW], 2007).
Ironically, the issue I will discuss here arose after a series of anonymous security breaches from one of its directors, George Keyworth. In 2005-‘6 the then non-executive Chairwoman, Patricia Dunn is said to have been upset at relatively minor boardroom leaks to the Wall Street Journal and others after a ‘CNET report where a director revealed he was tired after a planning session and admitted in January that HP hoped to sell a lot of
computers based on AMD's chips.’ (Vance, 2006) Whilst minor, this breach showed disunity between board members and lack of control of the board by the Chairwoman.

As a result of this Dunn contracted a third party firm of private investigators, Security Outsourcing Solutions, who, in turn, contracted the services of another…firm that employed a technique known as pretexting to gain access to the personal phone logs of both HP's directors and reporters. The firm's staff used personal information such as the directors' and reporters' Social Security numbers to trick phone companies into releasing the phone records (Vance, 2006). Investigators also trailed some reporters, including during a family trip to Disney Land (Goodin, 2007).
In September 2006 the story broke that, ‘Chairman Patricia Dunn okayed the internal investigation,’ with HP maintaining that, ‘it told partners not to do anything illegal as part of the probe.’ (Vance, 2006). In October that year, Dunn and HP ethics chief Kevin Hunsaker, private investigators Ronald DeLia and Matthew DePant were reportedly charged with ‘fraudulent use of wire, radio or television transmissions; taking, copying, and using
computer data without authorization; identity theft; and conspiracy for impersonating board members and reporters in order to obtain their phone records.
The fall out showed that internally, the situation was toxic, with one board member, Tom Perkins revealing that he quit in disgust after having learned of what had taken place. To make things even worse, HP refused to comment on whether it had tapped the phone records of its CEO, Mark Hurd. This ‘tarnished the company's reputation in the wake of solid recent financial reports.’ (Vance, 2006) Externally, writes Alex Koritz, public relations director for Sprout Marketing commenting in Society of American Business Editors and Writers [SABEW: 2007):
“HP also was quite delayed in their response, which breaks the No. 1 rule of crises management, get information out fast and accurately so you can help “guide” the story.”
HP has subsequently had to pay a $14.5 million fine and finance a fund to fight violations of privacy and intellectual-property rights. California’s Attorney General, Bill Lockyer said at the time, “Fortunately, Hewlett-Packard is not Enron… I commend the firm for cooperating instead of stonewalling, for taking instead of shirking responsibility, and for working with my office to expeditiously craft a creative resolution (Fried, 2006).” Subsequently, charges were dropped against the defendants, although Dunn resigned her Chair. The final case against one of the investigators involved was not heard until December 2012 when he was sentenced to three months in prison. The Fuld Gilad Herring Academy of Competitive Intelligence runs the Competitive Intelligence Certification Program (CIP). Its President, Dr Ben Gilad, says: “If more companies took care to thoroughly train their managers and executives in how to produce and how to use intelligence in all levels of the organization, fiascos such as those at HP…would be much less likely to occur.” (Academy of Competitive Intelligence, 2006).

TASK:
Go to the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals website: www.scip.org Spend a little time looking at some available reports in the ‘Publications’ link. On Blackboard’s Discussion Board, write a brief excerpt to discuss if competitive intelligence is a separate discipline, or merely another set of terminology for what we might understand as 

‘Market Intelligence’ or ‘Business Intelligence’?
We will now begin to reach into the second part of the term ‘competitive intelligence’. What does ‘intelligence mean’ in terms of being a business or organisational product? Moreover, how can we organise the production of intelligence? And what can go wrong if we mess up the process?
Despite a huge amount of press and political anxiety around functions associated with ‘intelligence gathering’ within the security sector, the fact remains that research, monitoring and evaluations of the competitive environment is routinely carried out all types of organisations, often under the guises of more benign terminology in all other sectors. To facilitate your knowledge in this area, please find an optional set of course notes (circa
4000 words) on: ‘what is intelligence?’ in ‘module materials’ on Blackboard. However, far less available information can answer popular questions within enterprises (particularly SMEs and those with minimal resources to allocate to ‘research’). To what extent should we be carrying out CI set against other priorities such as client meetings,
answering the phone and making sales? Moreover, what type of research is ethical and permissible? And can external contractors really step into our corporate shoes and realistically tell us what our risk and opportunity factors are? The society of ‘Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals’ (www.scip.org) was formed in 1986 (then under a different name) for executives to knowledge-share, network and assist executive decisionmakers tackle such dilemmas.