Another Consulting Firm Adds Homeland Security Service

Add one more consulting firm to the growing list of management and technology advisers that are furnishing homeland security services to clients.

Booz Allen Hamilton on Thursday said it has created a strategic security practice to help clients integrate security into their strategic business planning. Like other consulting firms and integrators that have introduced similar programs since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the model for the new offering leverages existing expertise.

Roland Rust, director of the Center for E-Service at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business, says the establishment of homeland security practices is aimed at generating additional revenue from current commercial and governmental clients. "They're trying to up-sell and cross-sell to existing customers," he says.

In Booz Allen's case, proficiencies in IT, security, information assurance, and operations will be combined with newly developed know-how in critical infrastructure protection and social networking engineering as part of its strategic security practice. The company says the new practice will help clients protect themselves from potential threats and vulnerabilities, including direct risks to personnel, physical property and equipment, and information, as well as indirect risks to business markets and channels, supply chains, and external infrastructure.

"Security has been elevated from a focus on insurance policies and infrastructure protection to a cardinal point on the CEO agenda--one that can produce a competitive upside or advantage as well as reduce risk," Dan Lewis, president of Booz Allen's worldwide commercial business, says in a statement announcing the new service.

Among Booz Allen execs who'll advise clients through the strategic security practice are Mike McConnell, a retired admiral and former head of the supersecret National Security Agency, and Rich Wilhelm, a former naval intelligence officer and national security adviser for former Vice President Al Gore.

Late last month, EDS named Robert Nabors, a retired Army major general and former Pentagon CIO, to lead that company's efforts to integrate and coordinate homeland-security services to federal, state, and local governments. Other IT vendors and consultants, including American Management Systems and Unisys, also have established special homeland security units to package products and services, such as biometric, access-control, and smart-card offerings.