Page 11 - Campus Security & Life Safety, March/April 2022

“To set up for success, not only must your people be focused on a unified goal, they need to be in constant communication across departmental lines while they’re working to achieve it. During both emergencies and day-to- day operations, a well-integrated critical event management strategy and the technology to back it are crucial for getting and keeping everyone on the same page.”
By Dustin Radke
Step 2: Align All the Elements within Your Organization
After you’ve defined organizational resilience, the next step is to identify the gaps in your plan and ensure everyone—from executives and department heads to individuals—thoroughly understands their role in responding to an unfolding crisis.
The truth is, organizations are still very likely to manage threats to their people or places in silo, from other departments. This ultimately leaves your organization exposed on multiple fronts, especially in light of the unpredictable nature of dynamic risk. When it comes to taking advantage of technology to mitigate risk, a siloed approach is particularly troublesome.
Conversely, research has demonstrated that integration builds business continuity. Alignment and integration go hand-in-hand. Highly capable firms are as much as five times more likely than less capable organizations to have an effective or optimized response to all manner of business risk. This includes information security, travel, employee welfare, data privacy and customer experience.
To set up for success, not only must your people be focused on a unified goal, they need to be in constant communication across departmental lines while they’re working to achieve it. During both emergencies and day-to-day operations, a well-integrated critical event management strategy and the technology to back it are crucial for getting and keeping everyone on the same page.
Step 3: Leverage Technology Powered by Artificial Intelligence
As a security leader, you know that timely, accurate information and effective communications are equally important when it comes to managing cascading and interconnected critical events. In many situations, getting the right information to the right people at the right time means the difference between life and death.
For example, in an active assailant event, advanced warning gives you an opportunity to lock down your campus. And if the shooter is already on your premises, you can potentially isolate their location in order to separate and protect students, patients and medical staff.
However, when it comes to risk intelligence and critical communications, traditional human-driven methods are no longer sufficient, accurate or fast enough to mitigate risk. Our world has become dominated by data, and this creates a key opportunity for security leaders. There’s too much information and it comes too fast for any individual to sort through manually. As an example, one healthcare security and safety director tried to monitor the state of local protests using multiple social media accounts and unverified tips called in by the community, only to be frustrated by the lack of clarity and accuracy. Not only was the process inefficient and time consuming, but the information gleaned was often inaccurate or already obsolete.
In a dynamic situation, you need technology that leverages artificial intelligence to vet sources and filter out the noise, allowing you to receive only information relevant to your campus operations. Thus, to enable better decisions in real time, an AI-enabled CEM platform
should provide four key competencies:
• Risk Intelligence: Delivers timely, contextual and relevant information
about critical events as they unfold.
• Critical Communications: Facilitates prompt and targeted
communications about the scope, location and likely impact of an
incident to targeted groups.
• Incident Management: Detects, records, analyzes, addresses and
learns from incidents in order to return to normal function as quickly
as possible.
• Control Center-Level Visibility: Collects, integrates and organizes
unstructured data to improve situational awareness of the overall threat landscape.
Relative to how these four competencies will manifest, your technology selection and configuration should take into account:
• The speed of changing information.
• The relevance of that information.
• The usability of the interface that delivers it.
In a dynamic situation, you need technology that leverages artificial intelligence to vet sources and filter out the noise, allowing you to receive only information relevant to your campus operations. Focus on granular risk intelligence with full coverage of threats that correlate to your people and property, with tightly woven filters, so you’re capturing and communicating only the most important data. You also need highly customizable information routing, so your people receive only the communications that pertain to their location or role.
The combination of speed, relevance and usability enables campus administrators to send timely and targeted alerts based on reliable information. When recipients know they can not only trust every communication as valid but know that it’s important to their well-being, security teams gain greater credibility and confidence that their messages and instructions will be followed.
Boost Your Confidence and Resilience in 2022
Without question, risk will continue to be more complex and dynamic, leaving organizations more vulnerable than ever before. To keep ahead, organizations must look at how they can achieve organizational resilience and how modern technology, like AI and big data, can help.
This is the year to say farewell to the old-school reactive approach and usher in a proactive approach backed by powerful technology. When you have an effective system and strategy for critical event management in place, campus administrator and security professionals can save time, money, effort and—most importantly—lives.
Dustin Radtke is the Chief Technology Officer at OnSolve, a leading critical event management provider for enterprises, SMB organizations, and government entities. With over 20 years of experience, Dustin excels at building, leading and transforming global product and technology portfolios for global businesses.
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