Emergency Response: Making Best-Practices Routine

You’re a control room operator in a busy operations centre for the London Underground. You’re alerted to a fire on the platform at one of more than 600 stations in the network. Now what?

Call the fire brigade? Evacuate the station? Contact staff at the station to investigate whether the fire is real, and how big it is? Check it yourself on the video surveillance system?

There are a number of possible first steps an operator could take, and there will undoubtedly be a defined process he or she should follow. But how often does an operator have to deal with such an incident? How can you be more certain that they will take the correct steps in the correct order?

Click here to view Figure 1.

For the past two years that I’ve been reporting on the security and fire industries, I’ve heard, read, and talked about so-called PSIM (physical security information management) systems. NICE Systems is one vendor of a PSIM system, and I was able to see and hear some real-world examples of its NICE Situator for the first time at this month’s UK Security Conference at Mercedes-Benz World in Surrey.

The conference’s delegate list reflects the kinds of organizations looking at PSIM — representatives of De Beers, EA Sports, Barclays, British Airways, and Deutsche Bank were just some of the people in attendance. And they’re here to find out about the huge benefits that an operational situation management platform can bring them.

NICE Situator is a complex system that connects otherwise siloed departments and systems in the event of an emergency. By joining up interested parties from transport police, fire service, security, operations, transport authorities, and maintenance teams, to name but a few, you can identify, respond to, and recover from a crisis more quickly.

By integrating systems from various manufacturers, the system uses an “advanced correlation engine” to add logic and give an operations centre a clear process for incident response. This is big-data analytics in action.

All operations centres will have a best-practice response, but in many cases that best-practice may well be written in a memo gathering dust on a bookshelf. Where a system such as Situator adds value is it brings the best-practice straight to the operator.

When the fire alarm sounds, the control room operator is shown the corresponding video surveillance feed and a map on his geographic information system. The operator is presented with simple questions and actions.

Action: Monitor fire with camera. Question: Are there signs of smoke or fire? Answer: Yes.

Meanwhile, a member of staff at the station has been despatched to the fire, with his mobile device asking him: Have you arrived at the platform? Yes. Have you contained the fire? No.

Back to the operations centre, where the control room operator’s system is auto-dialling the fire service and ordering an evacuation. The GIS system now shows a map with the evacuation routes and nearest fire fighting devices. The video analytics system is now using intrusion detection analytics to detect anyone who is ignoring the order to evacuate and showing them on the operator’s screen.

The tag line sums this all up simply: Getting the right insights to the right people at the right time.

A PSIM system isn’t cheap, but for a large organization the benefits are immense. Millenium Banks in Portugal, for instance, saved euro 658,000 a year by reducing its false alarms from 20,000 to 1,200.

De Beers
Jim Lucas, head of security technical services, diamond risk management, for De Beers, explained how the diamond house use a situational response system to save millions of dollars in potential theft. He told the conference:

NICE represents the single biggest spend as a proportion of what we spend [on security technology]. We have thousands of cameras — standalone they achieve nothing. There’s very little point in showing a video of our diamonds being stolen. What we want to do is prevent these.

NICE’s system, he explained, allows his operators to manage scenarios more quickly and more effectively as they’re developing. But the value of the system also extends to business processes. While diamond theft may be a significant part of lost revenue, so is the time miners spend in security screening. If, using technology, DeBeers can speed the screening process up then the miners are able to spend more time doing what they’re paid to do.

NICE employs what is called a 6-sigma improvement methodology to the processes that its clients follow during an incident. This process started in manufacturing where a factory line would use the methodology in order to aim for just 3.4 products per million being faulty. The methodology involves what is called a five-step DMAIC project methodology:

1. Define
2. Measure
3. Analyse
4. Improve
5. Control

By replaying an incident in real-time afterwards for analysis, an organization can play back all of the data and plug that back into the planning tool to create a new best-practice. The user doesn’t have to be retrained as he or she will simply see the new best-practice next time there’s an incident.

This is where many people see the real value of a situational management platform, as it ensures compliance through the evidence it generates in incident replay, as well as giving organizations
the ability to continually and gradually evolve their responses.

PSIMs are certainly not for your average small business, but when you look at the fact that one US utility company increased the number of sites it monitored from 14 to 250 after installing Situator, without increasing the headcount in the control room, then you begin to understand the potential.