Interim Director, Anthony Cresswell, Presented at NYS Forum's Security Committee Seminar on ROI for Your IT Security Investments

March 7, 2008

Tony CresswellDr. Anthony Cresswell, CTG interim director, presenting at the NYS Forum seminar.

The NYS Forum's Security Committee recently hosted a seminar entitled Is there a Return on your Security Investment? The seminar was specifically intended to assist state agencies with communicating the importance of supporting cyber security investments and measuring and validating the return achieved by those investments.

The speakers were introduced by JoAnn Bomeisl, co-chair of the Security Committee and moderated by Tom Duffy, deputy director of the NYS Office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination (CSCIC).

Dr. Anthony Cresswell, interim director at CTG, described methods for measuring and communicating public returns on information technology investments. These methodologies are based on five international case studies and related research findings that were developed it into a CTG white paper, Advancing Return on Investment Analysis for Government IT: A Public Value Framework, of which Dr. Cresswell was the lead author. In his presentation, Dr. Cresswell gave an overview of the white paper’s public value framework, which emphasizes defining value from the point of view of the public, not the government, as the basis for the public ROI assessment.

Additional speakers included:

Brian Fuller, senior security manager, BearingPoint Public Sector, who offered the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) as a framework for complying with standards designed to reduce exposure to financial, reputation, legal and operational risks, but also for achieving a high return on public investment.

Donald A. (Andy) Purdy, Jr., Esq., president of DRA Enterprises, who discussed and provided illustrations of applying the Resiliency Engineering Framework developed by Carnegie Mellon University and the Financial Services Technology Consortium.