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Three Ways to Keep the Dream Alive

Career getting too predictable? We profile three security execs who found ways to keep their jobs exciting and their careers moving forward.

He's also energized by other challenges this position creates. For example, he says, "My challenge is influence. I have to encourage the operational team to work with me and for me, even though they don't directly report to me." He does this by cultivating relationships&mdashsomething new for him&mdashwith the top managers for security operations. Those relationships so far have panned out, he says. "A few slipped through cracks, but I'll give myself a pass. We did a lot of transitioning last year."

As for the half of the job that's focused internally, on operations, Hamrick says, "anything you do on the ops side you have the ability to apply to the product side." So, for example, he took the processes he designed for internal antivirus, patch and software distribution and applied them to GE Healthcare's products, which run on 25 variations of the Windows and Linux operating systems. "You have to tweak the process to adhere to FDA regulations," he says&mdashregulations that force you to validate software changes before distributing them. "And you have to think logically," he adds. "A heart monitor can't have a 20MB agent running on it with lots of overhead, but the process is much the same."

The result: "We went from a six-month patch distribution cycle to seven days," Hamrick says. Happy engineers. Happy salespeople. Happy customers. GE Corporate has asked Hamrick for a presentation about his customer-focused successes.

He believes he has a dream job and hopes other companies start to treat the CISO position as a bottom-line contributor.

"I've come to realize that I possess information that no one else in the business has," Hamrick says. "It's more than being a subject matter expert; I have a monopoly on these ideas, and if I don't provide them, no one else can. It's up to me how much I will or can provide."

The Omnivore
Thomas B. Baines, MA, MPA, JD

Titles: attorney, licensed private investigator, certified forensic consultant, ASIS security professional

Career path: special ops/intelligence officer, program manager in National Lab, attorney, investigator, consultant

Dream aspects of his jobs: applying varied disciplines to security

Each Friday during the 1990s, as senior program manager at Argonne National Lab in Chicago, Thomas B. Baines would sit at a cafeteria lunch table with the old-timers. "Chemists, physicists, guys who'd been there since God invented atoms," Baines says. They'd talk shop, and Baines would listen. If he got lost, Baines would ask them to explain what they meant, and they would. It was like a minor-league ballplayer getting to hang out with Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Sandy Koufax and Satchel Paige every Friday. Over the years, Baines says, he got a graduate-level education in theoretical and applied physics that you couldn't buy.