Home » Identity & Access » Access Control

The Architect: How to Design a Secure Facility

Imagine being able to layer security into your building the way you do the plumbing or wiring. Genzyme's Dave Kent doesn't have to imagine it-he got to do it.

By Scott Berinato

Page 5

"It does all this without thinking about security," Kent says, "so I'm thinking about it."

A pattern was emerging. In every feature that Brailsford, the architects, the CEO or Vroman from the contractor described with giddy pride—the glass, the atrium and the environmental controls—Kent found vulnerability. Innately, The Genzyme Center's design is a security nightmare. If Kent hadn't brought security into Genzyme's culture, the center probably couldn't be secured at a reasonable cost afterward, if at all. It's conceivable to think that only because Kent has made everyone at Genzyme so security-conscious, including the CEO, that such an inherently insecure design could be approved.

Patel confirms that The Genzyme Center is a special case. "Typically, we try to work within the culture of the company," Patel says. "With this building, the culture will have to change."

The most obvious manifestation of this cultural shift, but not the only one, is a clean desk policy Kent's team is developing. It will guide employees on what they should not leave on desks or computer screens. Kent has considered investing in whiteboards with automatic shutters. He will not be shy about enforcing the clean desk policy through spot checks and discipline. When Genzyme moves the more than 900 crowded employees out of their current home down the road at the old Boston Woven Hose and Rubber Co., Kent will start to change their behavior.

Once, when Kent talked about the cultural shift he's about to foist on his company, he said it was about communicating trust and value. "It's a collaborative approach," he said. "If they trust you and you communicate value, you get your way." Remembering his collection of books, I briefly wondered if this came from Flawless Consulting.

Another time, he called his philosophy CPPhis own acronym for Continuous Professional Pressure. This time, he sounded much less like a consultant and much more like a tugboat captain. "Apply the right pressure at the right points, and you can turn a huge ship," he said. "A small, determined group can move a much larger organization."

The fact Kent has kept continuous pressure on Genzyme's brain trust for eight years now is something in itself. "I wanted to create parallel growth between our group and the company," Kent says. "Security falls apart over time for a lot of reasons. Sometimes the security team gets tunnel vision and asks for too much, or nothing happens for so long that everyone lets their guard down. Keeping the growth parallel hasn't been easy."