Tips to Improve Public-Private CSO Partnerships

As the government's influence over security practices grows, CSOs have a few suggestions to improve public-private partnerships.

December 01, 2003 — CSO — In the area of securitywhether it relates to homeland defense or to various industry guidelines and standards of practicethe consistent philosophy of the Bush administration has been to emphasize voluntary public-private partnerships and market-driven solutions over more adversarial, regulation-heavy approaches. While laying off the regulations is a popular course among private-sector companies, some pieces of the partnership puzzle still seem both frustrating and confusing to CSOs and the organizations they serve.

Questions abound. Does Washington really understand how businesses work? Does it know enough about the industries it seeks to influence? Is there money where the government's mouth is? Are the lines of communication really open and omnidirectional, or does too little information flow among too few parties? Can the inertia and weird prerogatives of bureaucracy be overcome? And are there some circumstances that call for compulsion and not just voluntarism?

CSOs don't lack a voice in these matters; but they would like their voices to echo a little louder in the halls and hearing rooms of the nation's capital. With that in mind, we asked CSOs representing different industries (oil and gas, electric power, manufacturing and health care) to sound off on the Beltway issues that affect them most, and to offer suggestions for achieving a more productive public-private relationship in the coming year.

[Editor's note: In this story we use the terms government and Washington more or less interchangeably and in a monolithic sense that, we concede up front, is somewhat unfair. Government consists of many agencies and countless individuals and is often more variable in its actions than perfectly consistent. Nonetheless, what we mean to suggest here is that there are norms of government conduct that are defining and characteristic. The conclusions our sources draw and the prescriptions they propose are offered in that spirit.]Get to Know the Private Sectorif a common theme ties together many of the threads in this story, it is the desire of CSOs for a true public-private partnership, one in which information flows in two directions and there's a greater understanding of the private sector on the part of Washington. Lynn Mattice, director of corporate security and business intelligence at Boston Scientific, is in the camp that believes that both the executive and legislative branches have to do a better job of reaching out to corporate CSOs. One model that Mattice strongly endorses is that of the State Department's Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC), which is a collaborative partnership between U.S. multinational companies and the State Department that has been around since 1985. Its goal is to help companies do business abroad and to identify security risks in foreign locales. CSOs are represented on the council.