Welcome to

Security and Quality in Organizations

The name of our research cell, “Security and Quality in Organizations”, emphasizes the ultimate goal and the systemic approach. Security must be understood as a quality improvement process in an organization, aiming at continuous improvement of organizational performance in a “secure” setting.

 Security is a chain with many weak links. The dynamics of security is crucial: Compliance erodes, vulnerabilities develop, risk perceptions change, time delays and misperceptions fool people. The interplay of human behaviour, organizational aspects, technology, tasks and environment in security settings is necessarily a system characterized by feedback, temporal change (nonlinear dynamics), time delays, soft factors, and interdisciplinary aspects. Clearly, the ultimate practical reason for studying such systems is to achieve desired goals and to prevent undesired performance. In other words, security systems need to be managed. All this makes System Dynamics a promising methodology to confront the many outstanding and ever growing challenges in security.