Where Does The Time Go?

Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, STEPHANIE SILK

Any security professional who has ever seen the end of a day and wondered, ‘Where did the hours go?’ may be interested in a new productivity tool to help track those hours.

Many days that seem to disappear may include those when body-time rules over brain time. This ratio is calculated from the so-called “E-factor,” or environmental factor, in which the number of uninterrupted hours is divided by body-present hours, a metric introduced by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister in their popular 1987 book, “Peopleware.”

In the security industry, body time can be counted as the time an employee is present for duty, whereas brain time consists of work-efficient activity, such as the time taken to investigate a breach. To avoid these lapses of downtime, TimePanic, Munich, a company whose Windows software product allows users to track, log and protocol daily activity, has now gone portable, with TimePanic for USB Drives.

With the program in place, users can easily track time to evaluate work efficiency and personal productivity. Productivity in the security industry is vital because it is one that is never “turned off.” Using the tool can help survey and review:

• how often a certain computer or station is used;
• how many security personnel should be working at one time;
• which times of the day are most prone to breaches;
• how often an officer is called to investigate.

The mobility-oriented nature of the USB function and the fact that it requires no installation — the program is distributed as a self-extracting ZIP file — allows security officers to pack their TimePanic with them and install it in a matter of seconds to keep using it throughout the day as they move throughout facilities.

For security management, the software allows users to enter comments, manage absences, calculate overtime and specify planned working hours. TimePanic can also be set to memorize computer “downtime” as working time, which includes when the computer is in hibernation mode or in standby.

“TimePanic can be used in places where the corporate policy doesn't allow installing software on the computer,” says TimePanic founder Lionel Spohr. This can include a high-security facility with many command centers or for employees that share a computer with various rotating shifts.

According to Spohr, it also contributes to a safer computing environment because it minimizes the risk of corrupting/polluting a computer's registry and its system directories because it does not use the registry and only writes to its own directory.

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

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