Tech Power Meets People Power

Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By MICHAEL FICKES

Many security departments today perform less efficiently than they should, not because they lack technology, but because they have been weighed down by good but unwieldy technology.

How security personnel interact with technology is a critical interface in any security deployment — and it's the point where systems are all too often ineffective. Sometimes it is lack of security force training; sometimes it is faulty system design. Sometimes it is too much information to be managed.

It's a problem recognized by security managers and technology vendors alike, and both are working on solutions.

Security managers, for instance, have begun to focus on hiring more computer-literate security officers and then training them better. At the same time, technical processes are being automated and made simpler. In some cases, vendors have begun to automate the management of technology — transforming security officers from laborers into technology managers in the process.

Security management on wheels

Suppose an alarm announces an unauthorized entry at a locked exterior door, the officer in the security operations center rolls a wheeled office chair across the floor to a console with access to live cameras.

What about the digital video recorder? The officer can wheel the chair over to that station and call up recorded video.

Suppose the digital video shows a person swiping a card through a reader without causing the door to open. Suddenly the door does open, but from the inside, and a person exits. The person trying to get in holds the door open and enters. What camera shows the corridor inside the door? The officer rolls the chair to another station, checks, and rolls back to the digital video recorder. More video tracks the individual to an office.

Somewhere in a drawer in the security center, there is a map of offices. According to the map, this office belongs to John Doe, whose picture — found at another console with access to the badging system — resembles the picture of the man just seen entering that office. Mr. Doe does not have privileges to get through that door. He probably should, given his responsibilities and the location of his office.

The officer rolls the chair back to his or her original station and sends an email asking Mr. Doe to stop by to get his card set up for that door. It's a good result, but it took far too much time and effort to achieve.

Proximex Corp., Sunnyvale, Calif., is one of the companies that build systems to consolidate information from many security technologies onto a single software application window. They have actually researched the chair-rolling phenomenon.

“We've found that the best security teams can roll through a half dozen or so stations and complete a complex operation in five minutes or less,” says Larry Lien, vice president of product management for Proximex. “But in most cases it takes 15 to 20 minutes to pull this information together.”

While it is empowering to have that much information coming in, it is a lot of information to deal with, especially if it isn't presented in a seamless manner, observes Nick Samanich, director of commercial strategic products with Boca Raton, Fla.-based ADT.

“Today, more and more dollars are being spent on GUIs (graphical user interfaces) and presentation screens that allow workflow rules to be plugged into systems,” Samanich says. “What that means is that guards won't have to think about pulling up information. Instead, information will be presented to them.”

Hiring Smarter, Training Better

“The ability to use technology is increasingly a basic requirement for the job of a security officer,” says Rich Cordivari, national training director with AlliedBarton Security Services based in King of Prussia, Pa.

AlliedBarton recently wrested a client away from a security guard firm that failed on the technology front. The client operates a large distribution warehouse that had begun to manage arriving and departing tractor-trailer loads by computer. The tractor-trailer loads arrive at a security booth at the front entrance. They also leave the facility by passing the security booth.

Records about arrivals and departures used to be kept by hand. But today, company executives want security officers on duty in the security booths to use computers to log arriving trucks in and to assign the trailers to parking slots. When a truck leaves the facility, the officer at the exit booth logs the trailer and its manifest out.

Upon starting the system, the company told its existing security company to take over the new task. “But the officers couldn't get a handle on the technology,” says Scott Gane, a vice president with AlliedBarton. “They didn't have the resources to train officers, and the officers had a limited skill set.”

AlliedBarton scooped up the client almost instantly. An account manager checked with the computer system vendor, and set up a training program that answered two questions: What 10 things will security officers assigned to this site have to know about the computerized logistics management system when they start their jobs? And what 10 things will security officers have to learn over the next month?

“In our world, our account managers have a huge training responsibility,” says Cordivari. “They know what the jobs requires. They know how to research and learn the jobs. And they know how to train officers to use technology.”

Making Video Smart

Monitoring hundreds of video cameras has always posed a problem for security officers assigned to the security operations center and for their corporate employers. No security staff can monitor all its cameras all the time.

Given the difficulties related to monitoring video in real time, many security departments today settle for reviewing video after an event has occurred. It is an unsatisfactory solution that may risk legal liability. People assume that if a facility installs cameras, someone is watching the video on a monitor.

Today's intelligent video software applications are fixing these problems by automating the job that no one could do: watching all of the cameras all of the time and notifying security officers when something important happens.

But intelligent video systems rank among the most complex security technologies on the market today. Can a security officer, even one that has attained basic computer literacy, operate such a complex system?

Based in Melville, N.Y., intelligent video provider Verint Systems Inc. has gone to great lengths to make its system intelligible to security officers. Verint hired a third party human factors company to develop concepts for an easy-to-use graphical user interface or GUI — the screen where security officers point and click with a mouse to carry out tasks.

“We want operators to be able to get to and use 80 percent of the application's capabilities with no more than two mouse-clicks,” says Alex Johnson, a senior product manager with Verint.

Take a door that normally doesn't open during the day. The Verint system can be set to send an alert to the security center when the door does open. In addition, the system will spin a nearby pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera around to look at the door.

At the security center, an officer receives the alert, checks a monitor, and clicks on a camera icon. Video appears on the monitor. No one is there. Another click brings up recorded video showing a person going through the door. If the operator chooses, a single mouse click will consolidate all of this information into a case file, which may eventually provide evidence to the authorities.

Verint can also be set to alarm on people loitering in certain areas, untended packages, people running too fast and other unusual behaviors.

Managing New Technology With Newer Technologies

Why can't one system watch everything and flag down a security officer when something important happens? Newer systems coming on the market are doing just that.

“If you can correlate information from all of these systems in an intelligent way, you can build a system that an operator can manage with single mouse clicks,” says Larry Lien of Proximex.

Lien points to the example of someone going through a restricted door equipped with a card reader, a camera and an intrusion alarm. That door is always related to that camera and card reader. All of these items are also related to a nearby window and a glass break alarm.

“Once you correlate sensors and data points (doors) throughout your facility, you can build a set of rules that can be used to automate the operation of different kinds of security technology,” Lien says. “For example, suppose a PTZ camera is responsible for two doors. If an alarm on door ‘A’ goes off, the system knows to focus the camera on door ‘A.’”

Proximex embeds these correlations into its software application that consolidates access to the company's complete portfolio of security technology into a single window or GUI. By clicking on an event, the system will present security officers with information in a seamless way, enabling them to focus on making decisions and taking action rather than gathering information.

The Proximex system employs a server that connects to all of the security technology in a facility. System software organizes frames with icons for each system onto a screen that resembles a Web site. A security officer logs onto the system in the same way as he or she logs onto an Internet Web site.

How to manage technology

The current generation of security technology boosts security capabilities, but it has also tied security people down, as they sometimes must learn to operate fairly complex systems. The next generation of technology seems quite different. User friendly-intelligent video systems and consolidated single window interfaces will both boost security capabilities and also free up security officers to manage technology instead of laboring over it.

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

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