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Dennis Treece and Massport: Safe Harbor

From Boston's Logan Airport to the city's waterfront shipping facilities, Massport CSO Dennis Treece patrols an anxious perimeter.

Despite a vivid imagination given to thoughts about, say, designing fences for maximum blast dispersion, Treece seems cheerful, relaxed and reasonably confident. In his office he has Aaron Copland playing (not, as it happens, "Fanfare for the Common Man").

Not surprisingly, Treece's intelligence background shows up strongly in his security priorities and practices at Massport. Intelligence is about gathering the best available information to support decision making. Treece's idea of good security is thus rich in information flows. While he readily agrees that success in security is "a year in which nothing happens," there still has to be enough data to bear out the cause-and-effect relationship between nothing happening and what you did.

"Successful programs collect the relevant metrics for you to measure your progress," Treece says. "What were you busy doing? Were you busy doing the right things or the wrong things? I'm in the process of implementing a set of metrics. We have to be able to brief others as to how we are spending the security dollar here at Massport." (Although Massport is a public agency, its operations are funded solely through private sources such as fees, bridge tolls, rents and parking revenue. In other words, no tax dollars are harmed during the making of security at Massport.)

While he concedes that he has the last word in setting strategy and direction, his is a consultative approach that draws on lots of other inputs. For example, to offer an outside perspective, Treece has assembled a security council of local business, political and academic leaders. (Included in the group is Sheila Widnall, former secretary of the Air Force and now a professor at MIT.) "Everyone has a voice. The [local] communities have a voice; the employees have a voice; the security professionals have a voice; the operational leaders have a voice; the board of directors has a voice. And this security advisory committee has a voice," Treece says. "Everybody has a voice. It's just that I have the loudest voice."More Than a Cost CenterUnlike most CSOs, Treece is in the enviable position of serving an enterprise whose main product is security. So for him, the agonies of getting security issues on the radar of top executives isn't a problem. He reports directly to Massport CEO Craig Coy, who like Treece has an armed services background (Coast Guard) to go along with his Harvard Business School degree. Treece describes his relationship with Coy as "excellent. There's no one between myself and himalmost physically." Coy's office is two doors down the hall. "I have 24-hour access to the CEO, total support," says Treece. "That was the promise that went with the job."