• Korean Security Journal
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• no.36
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• pp.177-200
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• 2013

As we enter a high industrial society that widens the gap between the rich and poor, demand for the security services has grown explosively. With the growth in quantitative expansion of security services, people have also placed increased requirements on more sophisticated and diversified security services. Consequently, market outlook for private security services industry is positive. However, Korea's private security services companies are experiencing difficulties in finding a direction to capture this new market opportunity due to their small sizes and lack of management-strategic thinking skills. Therefore, we intend to offer a direction of development for our private security services industry using a management-strategy theory and the Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP), a structured decision-making method. A resource-based theory is one of the important management strategy theories. It explains that a company's overall performance is primarily determined by its competitive resources. Using this theory, we could analyze a company's unique resources and core competencies and set a strategic direction for the company accordingly. The usefulness and validity of this theory has been demonstrated as it has often been subject to empirical verification since 1990s. Based on this theory, we outlined a set of basic procedures to establish a management strategy for the private security services companies. We also used the AHP method to identify competitive resources, core competencies, and strategies from private security services companies in contrast with public companies. The AHP method is a technique that can be used in the decision making process by quantifying experts' knowledge and unstructured problems. This is a verified method that has been used in the management decision making in the corporate environment as well as for the various academic studies. In order to perform this method, we gathered data from 11 experts from academic, industrial, and research sectors and drew distinctive resources, competencies, and strategic direction for private security services companies vis-a-vis public organizations. Through this process, we came to the conclusion that private security services companies generally have intangible resources as their distinctive resources compared with public organization. Among those intangible resources, relational resources, customer information, and technologies were analyzed as important. In contrast, tangible resources such as equipment, funds, distribution channels are found to be relatively scarce. We also found the competencies in sales and marketing and new product development as core competencies. We chose a concentration strategy focusing on a particular market segment as a strategic direction considering these resources and competencies of private security services companies. A concentration strategy is the right fit for smaller companies as a strategy to allow them to focus all of their efforts on target customers in a single segment. Thus, private security services companies would face the important tasks such as developing a new market and appropriate products for such market segment and continuing marketing activities to manage their customers. Additionally, continuous recruitment is required to facilitate the effective use of human resources in order to strengthen their marketing competency in a long term.