Our daily life is made up of routines and relies on tools to manage work and our activities. Even life in the control room of an airport, chemical plant or university relies on routines and technologies to monitor the correct unfolding of daily activities.
An efficient Control Room needs the right tools to monitor events and act to forsee damage or crisis. Preventing incidents is vital for managing the activities of any organization.
But what happens when something goes wrong? An airport lift breaks down, a survailance camera stops working during a procedural check or an unidentifiable alarm is triggered. In these cases, the Control Room is no longer able to guarantee the Safety of people and assets and must activate its Security procedures to keep the environment protected from physical and reputational damage.
Most organizations already have multiple solutions; from surveillance systems, to perimeter and access control, fire alarm systems and physical protection systems. What is missing, however, are the correlation and orchestration of information between these tools and the operating procedures that allow to take the appropriate measures to solve an incident, manage a crisis or mitigate a risk.
This ability to orchestrate data and procedures will be an increasingly central element in future control room. The reprocessing of the data, in fact a combination of the various items and tools in the field, allows full awareness of the situational picture.
Managing incidents: the importance of preparing and harmonizing data to determine the severity.
An accident can concern physical safety as well as reputational and economic damage; determining the correct overall picture according to the real time elements is essential to manage an event that can change radically depending on the "surrounding information."
There are countless examples: repairing an automatic door on an ordinary day will not have the same priority as a maintenance request during the prime minister's visit. The alarm generated by a single fire system will not have the same priority as three related alarms in the same sector. The perimeter violation will have increasing importance depending on the weak points of the area to be monitored. These examples speak only of physical security but could also include reputational damage, such as an unmanaged alarm with the right priority.
Data orchestration requires that different systems, the software and hardware infrastructure and the alarms communicate in a centralized environment. Most Vendors are now limited to simple integration to manage the correlation rules between events and devices.
In the next few years this simple integration will have to include operational processes. Incident Managers will be able to orchestrate operations based on priority, coordinating resources through all communication channels through a real incident mastery platform.
A correct integration of all this data allows the creation of complete, flexible and appropriate processes for each incident. A valid incident managment platform must not only to intercept or predict, but forsee what could be unknown.