Or, to illustrate exactly how many incidents were occurring before the fence went up? What was the impact after the fence went in? Have there been any incidents since the fence and cameras were put in place?

As security is typically viewed as a cost centre the pressure to prove that the money allocated for security systems is being well spent is on the rise.

If you only have a gut feeling about the value of the people and systems in your department you may be in trouble if senior management starts asking questions about justifying expenditures.

Building a business case to invest in new systems or maintain spending on existing security systems is not a new requirement, but few security departments have the tools or know-how to execute on delivering a plan to management on what they want to see.

If an executive came and asked for $500,000 out of your budget, would you be able to demonstrate the implications to the overall organization if that funding disappeared?

“Ad hoc answers aren’t going to fly anymore,” says Brian McIlravey of PPM 2000, an Edmonton, Alta.-based firm that provides software-based incident reporting and dashboard tools for tracking incidents. “The days of, “Uh, I think I have a problem’ are gone. You need hardcore stats to prove your need.”

And even when you collect data on your department, you better know how best to organize and present it to decision makers.

“It’s one thing to collect information; you have to know what to do with it,” says Kevin Murphy, director of security operations with Woodbine Entertainment in Toronto.

Murphy started using incident reporting data in the late 1990s and has continued to mine information to routinely identify problems day-to-day and more importantly perhaps, to help justify to the executive level the expenditures he is making and has invested in his security department.