ROI is up in the air

How do you measure or prove ROI? It's always been among the most difficult questions posed to professionals in the security industry, and it's difficult to answer no matter whether you are a seasoned 20-year CSO, a local manager of a contract guard force, a sales representative for a security integrator, a marketing specialist for some whizz-bang camera technology, or even a loss prevention agent working between the racks. On the surface, it doesn't seem such a difficult thing to prove, right? After all, as George Campbell wrote in the July 2009 issue of Security Technology Executive magazine (subscribe here), "Return on investment is fundamentally a measure of whether some activity is worth doing" (see his article "Showing the ROI of Contract Security Forces").

And ROI can't be a very difficult thing to prove, because we all know whether we are doing something that is worth doing. Every day we answer emails to business associates and clients and we do tasks that we don't even have to question whether they are worth doing. We know they are worth doing. Or at least we think we do.

As a nation, we know we have to screen passengers for bombs and guns, because otherwise some terrorist is going to take down an airliner. And we know instinctively that there is ROI to preventing that because planes are expensive, people's lives are valuable and the continuity of aviation operations is worth billions to the economy. We don't even have to measure that.

But reading a speech by Congressman John J. Duncan Jr., where he addressed Congress about budgeting for the Federal Air Marshal Service, I had to start questioning some of the security expenditures that we as a nation take for granted.

Rep. Duncan, a Republican serving for Tennessee's 2nd district, lambasted the effectiveness of the Federal Air Marshals (FAMs) in June of this year on the floor of the House. Duncan pointed out that the annual budget for the Air Marshal Service is $860 million. There are roughly 4,000 air marshals working the friendly skies, so that means we're spending about $215,000 per year per FAM to keep them flying. I suppose that doesn't seem particularly wasteful, since that figure presumably covers housing when out-of-town, travel to-and-from airports, and a good salary that makes them less susceptive to bribery, plus training, support staff, technology, guns, bullets, handcuffs and whatever else they need.