Remote Sensors

In the Bavarian city of Augsburg, a merchant family named Fugger flourished in the 16th century.

By Lew McCreary

October 01, 2005 — CSO — In the Bavarian city of Augsburg, a merchant family named Fugger flourished in the 16th century. The Fugger trading and banking empire extended throughout Europe and was known for having systematized the gathering of useful information, which would be compiled and filtered back to the Augsburg center by correspondents posted in its far-flung nodes. Examples of these dispatches included reports of famine in France, ominous stirrings of the Spanish Armada and religious riots in Antwerp. Of the last development, the Fugger correspondent wrote that "...as Catholics and Calvinists cannot keep peace with the Lutherans and Anabaptists, it will ill serve the promotion of commerce, and many persons will leave this town." In other words, religious strife can sure put a damper on business!

Some observers credit the "Fugger Newsletters," as they are known, for prototyping what eventually evolved into newspapers. (For more on the newsletters, see several examples collected by E.L. Skip Knox, an adjunct history professor at Boise State University: www.boisestate.edu/courses/reformation /sources/fz/index.shtml.) The corporate governors of the Fugger family recognized that they couldn't make intelligent business decisions in a vacuum. They needed news about conditions in regions too far distant to be observed directly. So they instructed their representatives to file reports on local developments that might affect business.

This same impulse now leads businesses to hire people whose background and training include intelligence gathering and analysis. Jerry Brennan, the managing director of Security Management Resources, an executive search firm that specializes in senior-level security placements, says that demand for security analysts rises and falls with the state of the economy. (For this reason he advises against specialization in only this one area of security practice.) Brennan says he's now seeing an upward bounce in analyst placements, though he's unsure whether that's a trend or simply a reflection of a natural economic recovery. Typically, security analysts have been sought by companies that fit the Fugger modelmultinationals with operations in places whose political, social and economic climates range from variable to unstable, with ramifications for security practice.

As the growing tragedy of the U.S. Gulf Coast deepened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it was a given that security analysts and the CSOs they report to were paying close attention to those unfolding events. It's hard to miss the import of a catastrophe so large. But what about smaller, less obvious phenomena that occur in local markets and that may presage larger impacts? In the case of New Orleans, for instance, a gumbo of crucial ingredientsadding up over timecontributed to the extent of the damage. It's been widely reported that money for reinforcing New Orleans' levees was slashed or shifted into other DHS priorities; that the overdevelopment of coastal wetlands and barrier islands was allowed; and that disaster planning in the face of a known and not unlikely vulnerability was repeatedly back-burnered.

Would those developments have made it onto the radar of a security analyst toiling for one of the companies whose crucial interests or supply-chain interdependencies pass through New Orleans and its vital port? The Fugger clan were definitely onto something. Like religious unrest, a storm of the right magnitude striking an underprepared region can be very bad for business.

I would be interested in hearing from any of you who hold the security analyst job and can help meand CSO's readersbetter understand its purview.

Read more about security leadership in CSOonline's Security Leadership section.

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