It is critical to understand that success in establishing and cultivating ART-fulness (agility, resilience, trust) at your enterprise—like success in establishing and cultivating comprehensive security—is largely an outreach-driven effort.

Both require consistently high levels of internal marketing, sales, and evangelism.

These requirements may constitute the bulk of your challenges as you seek to establish, grow, and promote both ART-fulness and security at your enterprise.

Fortunately, there are some straightforward steps you can take to tame these challenges, steps based on some fundamental, consistently successful marketing and outreach techniques.

How to Make Your Enterprise More Secure and More ART-ful

  • Engage

Security and ART-fulness are things you simply cannot achieve and do not even want to attempt without lots of help and support. Identify the influencers, leaders, and stakeholders who matter most to your efforts. Then, make sure their voices are heard and matter, and make sure that they know these things are true.

  • Inform

Once you’ve identified those who matter most, get and stay in touch with them. Tell them what you’re doing and why. Tell them how their support is contributing to your efforts and why those contributions matter. Regular, non-disruptive, nonintrusive communications, perhaps via a short e-mail newsletter, a dedicated internal Web site or portal, or both, can be low-effort, high-impact tools here.

  • Persuade

Use the activities and information with which you engage and inform your constituents to persuade them that comprehensive security and ART-fulness are essential to your enterprise’s success. Find and share supporting external examples of secure, ARTful enterprises.

Identify and tout credible data that underscores the business value of security and ARTfulness—and the costs and risks of not having enough of either. Free, simple, Web content monitoring tools such as Google Alerts can make finding such points of persuasion easier.

Also, when you and your colleagues successfully improve security, agility, resilience, and/or trustworthiness within your enterprise, promote these successes to as many stakeholders and influencers as possible. Nothing persuades like success.

  • Invite

This is one of the most critical and frequently overlooked elements of successful outreach. Every communication should include a call to action—an invitation to do something to continue the conversation. Ask your constituents for their opinions and suggestions wherever possible.

Hold events such as webinars and Tweet chats, and invite constituents to participate. Solicit success stories or even “epic fails” related to security, ART-fulness, or both, and share these with attribution. Welcome input and feedback, and incorporate these explicitly into your enterprise’s journey to greater security and ART-fulness. This is one of the most effective ways to turn the disinterested and skeptical into observers, stakeholders, and advocates.

An enterprise that is optimally secure and ART-ful is one that is well positioned for sustained success, whatever its primary business. But neither optimal security nor ART-fulness ever just happens. Each requires careful, consistent nurturing and support from a committed community of advocates.