Security consultants and security risk management professionals have waited a long time for an updated edition of the landmark HB 167 handbook. According to one of its authors, the big day is arriving, writes Nicholas Dynon.
HB 167:2006 Security Risk Management author Dr Carl A. Gibson reported via LinkedIn earlier this month that the publication proof for a new HB 167 has dropped and is now awaiting approval by the Standards Australia MB025 technical committee for security and resilience.
According to Dr Gibson, it was 2005 when he and Mike Rothery (Australian Attorney General’s Department) had a conversation in a Thai restaurant in Canberra about the challenges of applying the joint Australian and New Zealand Risk Management Standard AS/NZ 4360 to security.
“With neither of us having a notebook with us, we eventually (after many hours) left the restaurant with about a hundred napkins and a tablecloth covered in dense notes and conceptual diagrams,” he wrote.
“I spent the following couple of weeks transcribing and translating (my handwriting) and developing a proposal for a new Standards Handbook, that was eventually published in 2006 as HB 167 Security Risk management.”
The task of revising the document started almost a decade later, but it would take several more years and a pandemic before a Working Group was established with Standards Australia and the process of rewrites started.
Last year, Dr Gibson states, a draft Handbook was released for detailed peer review, which received about 450 reviewer comments.
“After several months of meetings, the comments were finally resolved, and the almost as long process of professional editing by Standards Australia and the back and forth with the Working Group was underway and a Final Draft was finally agreed upon.”
According to Dr Gibson, the updated Handbook is due to be published late June, and is likely to be available to the public in early July.
He comments that the new HB 167:2025 will be the largest and most comprehensive risk-related Standards publication ever, including 162 pages of practical guidance and 48 figures to help explain key concepts and processes.
“The Working Group has pushed a number of boundaries in risk thinking over the last few years, and HB 167 will be one of the foundation documents for the recently formed Working Group of OB007 that a few months ago started the process of developing a new Standards Australia practitioners’ guide on managing risk.”
Dr Gibson points out that everyone involved in the writing of HB 167 and the peer review did so on a voluntary basis, their contributions amounting to “hundreds of thousands of dollars in time, travel, and other expenses in the development and sharing of such knowledge over the years.”
