House of security: a structured system design & analysis approach

Abstract

Security managers must always be on guard to prevent terrorist and criminal attacks against their organizations. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for organizational security decision-making process and security system design. It builds on the house of quality (HOQ) (a customer-requirements planning matrix) by developing a house of security (HOS) that can translate the likelihood and severity of attack scenarios against organizations into a structure comprising security system components ranked according to their likely effectiveness in preventing an attack. We assume that correlations between the system components might be changed for each scenario, i.e. several roofs, corresponding to the number of rows in the HOS matrix. For comparing different security systems designed to prevent the same threats, a measure of effectiveness is proposed. The analysis of variance method is utilized to select the vital security components by dividing the security components into two groups: vital few and trivial many. The HOS method is implemented for hotel protection from a terrorist attack, revealing fi ve components as dominant for security: Operating procedures, TV cameras, internal personnel, entry control, and visual information analysis. A partial analysis to identify the most important component for protecting a specifi c place (parking area) shows that the number of the vital components decreases and the dominant components for preventing parking area threats are operating procedures and internal