Smart cards, like other steps along technology’s ever-evolving pathway, biometrics and megapixel cameras to name two others, share ingrained challenges. New stuff is often more expensive than existing stuff. Bring something new in and, often, you have to upgrade other gear that is part of the total system to make it all work together. Then there are design, installation, maintenance and training costs as something new comes through the door.

Melissa Maddox has a lot of visitors, a lot of very important visitors, who stop in to view their very expensive assets in a very expansive facility.

Don’t be afraid. This is all about habits. And it is a twin spin from an MIT lab and a self-help professor at Utah State University, a seemingly deadly combination, but which may hold the key to how to sell security to the boss and employees, how to balance values and principals professionally and personally as well as how to sell Febreze at Walmart, if you want.

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

No doubt, too many choices can lead to confusion. Still, and obviously, the ubiquitous Web and mobile devices, to a lesser extent, have spurred hosted and managed services, remote intelligent monitoring, software-as-a-service and in-the-cloud solutions that impact access control, security video, mass notification and even security guarding.

It was, in its time, a soothing miracle cure or a humiliating school day when I smelled like an over mentholated pine forest. But it’s also an example of a domino falling, which can lead to surprising places, both good and bad. There are domino effect examples throughout the security field, too.

That is, if it works. At 2:00 pm one day last November, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Communications Commission held a first-ever nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System. The plan was that all publicly-accessible television and radio stations would run the announcement.

Remember Cathy Cruz Marrero? No? Well, maybe you remember her starring role in what was probably the most viewed security video of 2011. While texting on her phone walking the Berkshire Mall in Wyomissing, Pa., she fell into a mall water fountain.

Larry McEvoy really digs his job. His firm, CONSOL Energy, a leading diversified energy company, helps generate two-thirds of the nation’s power supply, responsible for mining more high-quality bituminous coal than any other U.S. producer as well as the largest gas producer in Appalachia.

As enterprise security executives cozy up to the C-suite folks, there is more focus on protecting the brand and the organization’s reputation. It may be a more complex assignment than first thought.