Corporate Security

Entrepreneurship is the process of seizing or creating opportunity without regard to the resources controlled. This course is innovative in its curriculum, as it deals with theory and practice of managing and owning your business and how new businesses are started. It shows methods of recognizing opportunities, exploiting them and obtaining the desired business results. The course also deals with the problems of running a family business, working with family members and building larger organizations. It teaches the students the steps in creating a good business plan.

This course provides students with the required skills to produce clear written communication which is concise and persuasive and which helps enhance the competitive advantage of the company. Topics include reports, proposals, tenders and letters, commercial correspondence and effective reports. Furthermore, the course examines the seven aspects of a dynamic presentation, shows methods of structuring, visualizing and delivering the message.

This course explores the basic concepts of managing, planning and controlling an organization. It begins with the process of building leadership skills and lays a solid base for the difficult tasks of human resources management. The course focuses on communication, decision making and leadership for administrative and managerial positions in business and government.

This course explores into depth the issues and concepts of a successful financial management of a firm. Topics include capital budgeting, NPV, IRR, Profitability Index, Net Working Capital management in cash management, credit policies, receivables management, inventory.

The increased competition and the challenges of the global economy result in many companies today profiling themselves and therefore outsoursing parts of their R & D, production and delivery processes to specialised, external suppliers. The result of this phenomenon is the increasing need of managing suppliers and the underlying purchasing and negotiation processes, which have become crucial to the financial success of the firm, both in relation to costs, but also to quality and innovation.

The course provides the foundation for understanding information systems and examines IT-related roles, functions and strategies in today’s business environment. The course will cover the principles and concepts of IS, the motivation for using IS in business, the technologies implemented and their applications, and the reciprocal relationship between the organization and information technology.

The global environment of today and the increased cultural diversity in business require culturally-aware managers in both domestic and international markets. This course focuses on cultural and cross-cultural management and communication and builds an understanding of the impact of cultural diversity on business practices.

This course focuses on how firms formulate, implement, and evaluate strategies in a turbulent and rapidly changing environment. Students will focus on integrated decision making in terms of strategy formation, implementation, and evaluation.

This unit will introduce students to the key themes of corporate security. It will explore the role of ‘security processes’ within a business setting, and will underscore the principle of protecting critical business assets whilst enabling business activity.

The unit will identify corporate security as a core business function, relevant to all employees, to be undertaken in conjunction with aspects of corporate responsibility, human resource management and legal compliance.

The unit will then outline the central building blocks of a corporate security program, including risk management, business continuity management, physical security, supply chain security, critical infrastructure protection, information security, corporate intelligence, corporate forensics and of health and safety. This unit will prepare students for an in-depth analysis of how to understand, articulate and apply the basic standards of corporate security.

This unit is divided into three subdivisions:

The first part considers the way terrorist threat assessments are perceived by governments and organizations around the world. Threat assessment is a matter of risk management and the unit considers various methodologies for analyzing terrorism as a risk management issue. It deals with the interaction of capabilities and intentions as well as the creation of risk matrices. It also looks at the way national risk registers and risk audits have been conducted.

Finally, national resources have to be allocated to some definition of security risks and students will be introduced to the political and administrative problems of allocating appropriate resources on the basis of the assessment of risks.

Part two deals with organizations of all types and them being subject to ‘risk’ – the uncertainty caused by internal and external factors on whether key objectives (e.g. value creation) will be achieved.

This subdividion will examine risk management, defined here as the coordinated process and activities through which an organization attempts to direct and control uncertainty. It will introduce students to the established methods of: a.) designing a risk management framework and plan; b.) risk identification, analysis and evaluation; and c.) effective risk treatment and control.

Drawing upon case studies from across a range of different sectors, the unit will encourage students to consider risk management as a cornerstone of any corporate security program.

The third part examines the key themes of Business Continuity Management (BCM), a holistic process which builds upon risk management principles and enables organizations to identify, assess and manage the threats to its key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value-creating activities.

The unit will outline the key threats faced by modern businesses, including theft, terrorism and extreme weather events. It will then set out the core components of an effective BCM program, including crisis management, health and safety, physical security and supply chain risk management.

The unit will consider how organizations of all sizes can develop and maintain a bespoke Business Continuity Plan (BCP) – a process defined as the BCM Lifecycle. In particular, five stages will be explored: (1) Understanding the organization; (2) Assessing the risks; (3) Developing a BCM strategy; (4) Implementing the BCP; (5) Testing the BCP and updating the BCM program.

Drawing upon case studies from the finance and retail sectors, the unit will then consider real-world examples of how organizations have implemented BCM programs in the event of natural and man-made threats. The unit will also review the importance of international regulations, and in particular ISO 22301, in driving-up BCM standards and practices.

Situated within the wider context of Business Continuity Management (BCM), physical security measures aim to prevent or deter a direct attack on an organization’s premises and reduce the potential damage and injury that such an attack could inflict. The threats to businesses can cover a wide spectrum of malicious human activity, including theft, vandalism, espionage and terrorism.

With reference to examples from across the public and private sector, students will be introduced to the key features of an effective physical security regime. This will include aspects of site security and security engineering, such as perimeter access control, hostile vehicle mitigation and blast effects mitigation, alongside the deployment of electronic systems (CCTV) and dedicated security personnel.

The unit will argue that physical security measures are an important part of an integrated approach to corporate security, BCM and Supply Chain Security (SCS).

From small enterprises to multinational corporations, businesses the world over depend upon the safe, secure and reliable transit of goods and products along the supply chain. This unit will consider two bodies of thought which have come to underpin the effective management of this process: Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) and Supply Chain Security (SCS).

The unit will begin with a discussion of SCRM, an essential feature of Business Continuity Management (BCM) and a process through which organizations: a.) reduce the likelihood of supply chain disruptions, and b.) limit the potential impact of disruptions on their key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value-creating activities.

The unit will then consider the core principles of SCS, an area of activity which employs Physical Security practices to protect supply chain assets from contamination, theft, damage and destruction.

Drawing upon case studies taken from air, road and sea freight, the unit will consider real-world examples of how effective SCRM and SCS programs have been used to counter a diverse range of natural and man-made threats. The unit will also underline the central importance of good supply chain management, introducing students to risks and benefits of modern, ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) economies.

Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) is concerned with the security and resilience of the assets and systems upon which modern societies depend, such as power stations, water supplies and transport networks. For businesses, the loss of these essential services could result in damaged property, supply chains and trade, as well as injury or loss of life among staff.

The unit will introduce students to the core themes of CIP. It will consider a spectrum of natural and man-made threats to essential systems and assets, with a particular focus on terrorism, malicious cyber activity and extreme weather events. A series of best-practices, counter-measures and resilience policies will also be set out. Students will be encouraged to think about critical infrastructure as an international, interconnected and interdependent system. The unit will argue that a mature understanding of how businesses rely on critical infrastructure is essential to effective risk and business continuity management (BCM).

This unit will look at the relationship between terrorism and organized crime. This unit will look at the definitions and approaches to organized crime and consider the ways in which terrorist groups have used organized crime networks to further their aims.

The unit will take a particular case study of India, focusing on the Mumbai attacks of 2008 as an example of the terrorist-crime nexus, alongside other perspectives from Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. It will also look at the challenges for the security authorities of organized crime in an increasingly splintered Europe and the effect this may have on the incidence and operations of terrorist groups.

The unit goes on to consider the interpretation of intelligence material and the techniques for assessing open source information – its collection, interpretation and use within the full cycle of intelligence operations. The student will learn some of the ways of efficiently accessing open source research and the first part of this unit closes by considering techniques for safe-guarding any organization against the vulnerabilities created by open source research. The use of open source material is both an opportunity and also a vulnerability to organizations that make specific use of it.

Information Security is concerned with the management and protection of confidential or sensitive digital assets. The second part of this unit will introduce students to the core principles of this process, demonstrating how organizations of all sizes can counter a wide spectrum of threats, from industrial espionage through to e-crime and fraud.

The unit will then set out a comprehensive information security framework, which describes how an organization can develop a bespoke program for protecting digital assets such as intellectual property and customer records. In particular, it will focus on: a.) Understanding digital assets; b.) Identifying Risks; c.) Developing an Information Security Strategy; and d.) Implementing, Testing and Maintaining Information Security Plans.

The unit will encourage students to think of information security as a strategic process which encompasses the IT systems, people and processes within an organization. It will be stressed that an effective information security program should both protect and enable business activity, and that information security is intertwined with legal compliance and human resources management, as well as the practices of corporate intelligence and forensics.