We are all familiar with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA).  Now simply known as the Baldrige Award – the Performance Excellence Award.

Well, a new award is coming – The Baldrige Cybersecurity award may be out in a year or so.

Why?  Well, information and data is where value is more commonly found.  The information may be organizational, personal, or intellectual property.  This information is hugely valuable and is commonly digitized.  The information has to be protected through cybersecurity.

NIST Cybersecurity Excellence Builder

Last week, I attended the Baldrige Cybersecurity Bootcamp in Baltimore.

First a little history:  We had the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA).  Then, this matured to the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program.  Now, we’re going to have a Badrige Cybersecurity Award – probably within two or so years.

NIST now wants to:

“blend the best of two globally recognized and wide used NIST resources: the organizational performance evaluation strategies from the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program and the risk management mechanisms of the Cybersecurity Framework.

For more information on how to use the Baldrige Performance Excellence program and Cybersecurity Framework, click on the urls above.

Benefits of Using Cyber Self Assessment

Using this self-assessment, an organization can

• Determine cybersecurity-related activities that are important to your business strategy and critical service delivery;
• Prioritize your investments in managing cybersecurity risk;
• Determine how best to enable your workforce, customers, suppliers, partners, and collaborators to be risk conscious and security aware, and to fulfill their cybersecurity roles and responsibilities;
• Assess the effectiveness and efficiency of your use of cybersecurity standards, guidelines, and practices;
• Assess the cybersecurity results you achieve; and
• Identify priorities for improvement.[i]

What Does This Mean to You? 

We believe each organization should be a cyber fortress to protect its intellectual property.  We believe each person should be cyber aware to protect our cyber information.

A market is now evolving where we need tens of thousands of cyber consultants.  NIST sees this market opportunity blending its cyber framework with the Baldrige.

Take a look at the these guidelines and think how you can integrate them into your business and consulting.  There’s a gold mine for you.

[i] Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, v. 1, 2017.

Bio:

Greg Hutchins PE and CERM (503.233.101 & GregH@QualityPlusEngineering.com)  is the founder of:

CERMAcademy.com
800Compete.com
QualityPlusEngineering.com
WorkingIt.com

He is the evangelist behind Future of Quality: Risk®.  He is currently working on the Future of Work and machine learning projects.

He is a frequent speaker and expert on Supply Chain Risk Management and cyber security.  His current books available on all platform are shown below: