QW2002 Paper 10G1 Mr. Don O'Neill (Center for National Software Studies) Competitiveness Versus Security

Key Points

• Participants will be able to reason about the practices and factors driving the competitiveness versus security trade off and assess the leading indicators underlying these factors for their own organization.
• While both are essential, it is clear that competitiveness and security travel on separate paths that do crisscross and overlap at certain points. The competitiveness versus security trade off may be tilted towards competitiveness, thereby, exposing the nation's critical software infrastructure to predictable security threats.

Presentation Abstract

There is an important national debate on CyberSecurity. It centers on who pays the bill, the private or public sector. On the one hand, the public sector argues that security and competitiveness move together, therefore, the private sector should pay the cost to be competitive. On the other hand, the private sector argues that security costs too much, and the probability of occurrence is too low to force the investment especially during the period of economic recovery.

The knowledge required in this trade off revolves around the practices and factors that embrace both competitiveness and security and those that embrace one at the expense of the other. A web-based scoring and analysis tool is used to assess the impact of the three types of practices and factors used to frame the issue including trustworthiness, cost effectiveness, and survivability. Leading indicators are identified for each practice and factor.

About the Author

Mr. Don O'Neill: Following his twenty-seven year career with IBM's Federal Systems Division, Mr. O'Neill completed a three year residency at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) under IBM's Technical Academic Career Program. An independent consultant, he focuses on Software Inspections training, directing the National Software Quality Experiment, and conducting Global Software Competitiveness Assessments. He is a founding member of the Washington DC Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) and the National Software Council (NSC) and serves as the Executive Vice President of the Center for National Software Studies (CNSS) http://www.CNsoftware.org. He is a collaborator with the Center for Empirically-based Software Engineering (CeBASE).