My recent experience of observing an Emergency Management planning exercise really made me re-think some fundamentals of security system design.  Here is what I am going to do in the future:

1.    Use Audio (Electronic) Surveillance. Make sure you have audio capability any where you may have confrontations with customers, visitors, or guests to your campus.  Check out the electronic surveillance laws in your state.

2.    Plan on the Unexpected. Designing your system around alarm activation is great, and I still recommend it, but the system still must perform in live alarm conditions that you may not anticipate. One of my favorite video management systems today for live alarm response capabilities is from Milestone Systems.  Milestone has some very powerful video management tools that can be helpful to first responders when they encounter a crisis.

3.    Cover Evacuation Routes. Make sure your executive evacuation routes are fully covered by video feeds. Knowing and seeing that your executive exit routes are free from danger is critical. During the drill, we had some blind spots. I held my breath as the executive team made its way between camera location through the evacuation route. With the low price of today’s IP cameras, today you can really afford not to cover the whole evacuation path?

4.    Use High Quality Video. Make sure you have the very best video quality you can afford. You may not record video streams at the highest quality level, but in a crisis mode it sure is helpful to have that detail. New High Definition cameras provide incredible quality at a great price (more of that on a future post).

5.    Maximize The Viewing Area. Designing your security command center for optimum response to disaster scenarios requires large monitors. Today, 46- and 50-inch monitors cost much less than they did a few years ago and they provide ample real estate to view video, manage a crisis and coordinate response efforts.

6.    Provide Video Streams. Include your local law enforcement community in the planning process. Prior to this exercise we worked with clients to enable sharing or making video stream available to multiple agencies and jurisdictions.  Watching the scenario and seeing how much better the dispatchers performed when video was available convinced me to continue working to provide law enforcement with video feeds from private entities. A great success story on this has been implemented by the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC).  The 3CDC is a private, non-profit corporation that has used GIS integration to provide better security for local business while providing access to the Cincinnati Police Department.

7.    Test. The best system that we can design is sure to have some gaps. Test, test, test it!  Make sure the system performs the way you need it to based on real life drills. Use the lessons learned from the drills to improve your system. The system should not be static. We need to regularly review what we have done and ask the questions “Is the system still relevant?” and “Are there other threat scenarios that should be addressed?”