Delivering Better Value from PSIM Systems

Don’t limit physical security information management to products and systems; think about how ‘managing incidents’ overall can become customer specific.

Mickey McCarter

A security manager once recalled an incident on a university campus that took him more than 35 hours to pull together a complete understanding of what happened.

Three people assisted the security manager in the task, contributing even more time, while the local media and the surrounding city criticized the university for an apparent lack of response to the incident.

The manager recounted the situation to Dr. Bob Banerjee, senior director of training and development for NICE Systems‘ Security Division, who said it should have taken the man only two hours to collect the information required. In that case, the university would have been able to quickly inform the media and the city as to what happened and how it responded.

But the university lacked a physical security information management (PSIM) system, which is command and control software for incident management. A PSIM system coordinates disparate systems such as video management and card access control to provide operators with a complete picture of incidents through the convergence of physical security, informa- tion technology and audio and video. But Banerjee reveals it actually does much more than that.

“PSIM is not about managing sensors; it’s about managing incidents,” Banerjee says.

Related: Welcome to the Security World’s Most Misunderstood Acronym: PSIM

In sessions for SIA Education at ISC West, Banerjee detailed his consultative approach to PSIM: listening to an incident, discovering how it transpired, uncovering what could have been done differently and explaining (with vendor neutrality) how PSIM could have made an impact. An end user is left to determine if PSIM would have been valuable in that scenario.

“What is relevant to you as an end user is completely irrelevant to the guy sitting next to you,” Banerjee says.

As such, Banerjee has developed an approach to PSIM that focuses on assessing the requirements of an organization while remaining agnostic to various products. He suggests that systems integrators take the same approach. While PSIM lives in a command and control center and produces a common operating picture, its value is much greater than that. NICE Systems, a member of the Security Industry Association (SIA), for example, offers a PSIM software package called NICE Situator. But it does more than one thing if used holistically.

“People buy a video management system to do one very specific thing; the same with a card access control system. But with a PSIM system, they use it for many different things,” Banerjee explains.

Related: Why PSIM Matters for Access Control

Smart systems integrators likely should turn over some of their staff to fully embrace PSIM, Banerjee prescribes. Instead of employees who think about installation and configuration, integrators should hire staff that will understand what the end user does as a business and how they respond to certain incidents. They will then hire and deploy staff to program those procedures into the PSIM software.

PSIM integrates all sources of information such as video and card access management systems together, prioritizes information so the end user is not overwhelmed and walks an end user through standard operating procedures for the organization.

“If you are going to be in the PSIM space, you cannot think of it as just software that integrates two or three systems to give a common operating picture. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You are getting 10 percent of the value of PSIM. If your PSIM cost $1 million, congratulations — you just got $100,000 worth of value out of it,” Banerjee says.

PSIM is about managing incidents whether they are about security, safety or operations, which is its true value, Banerjee says. End users can help their organizations run operations by managing incidents overall more effectively — whether they are related to security or not. In doing so, they will keep their organizations from potentially losing a lot of money.

“Whether the security systems integrators are ready to play in that space is a great question,” Banerjee says. Are you ready to answer?

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