By Jes Stewart

[reprinted from the ASIS Cultural Properties Council August 2016 Newsletter] 

I was honored to be invited to speak at the Smithsonian’s annual National Conference on Cultural property protection. This year’s conference was held in Washington at the Museum of Natural History and the Newseum. Both fantastic venues to be sure. There were attendees from wonderful museums from all over the United States, England, Holland and many other countries.

I was fortunate enough to give a panel presentation with three other outstanding managers in the security field. These were Russell Collett who works with our own Tom Henkey at the Art Institute of Chicago, Jason Heberlein who is the Director of Security for the Broad in L.A. and Jeff Strong, the Directing Supervisor of Security at the BYU Museum. Each of us gave the conference participants a look at our security departments and how we successfully implemented a strong customer service aspect to our security programs. We talked about our successes and how we overcame obstacles to ensure that we had formed the best customer service oriented security departments possible.

The presentation was very well received. I am still, at this time, receiving numerous emails and phone calls from museums in Colorado to London, England asking for direction on how to help make their security department more customer service focused.