Remember the purpose of situational awareness is getting a wide view of what’s happening in and around your organization and then using that information for better risk management. With situational awareness technology, you can read, hear, see and then do something about the data that you’ve received.
That data comes in the form of detailed alerts made possible by integrating your facility’s various alarm systems, including those for life safety and security as well as environmental monitoring.
Now when a triggering event occurs, not only do you get an alert, but that event also is logged within a database. Then both real-time and historical reports are available on the status of every monitored, alarm-producing device. These event histories, or reports, can be used to gain important operational insights and analyze response times and escalation protocols to identify problem areas and improve performance. This is the analyze portion of the situational awareness formula.
As I’ve talked about before, many sorts of organizations are expected to have crisis management plans in place. These are often required to qualify for state and federal funding – educational institutions, for example. Also consider health care facilities where good recordkeeping also is essential for obvious reasons – life and death.
From a dashboard on their PCs or smartphones, administrators can get daily and historical reports of alarm activations. Historical reports can be used to demonstrate regulatory compliance, showing that temperatures within refrigeration units for medication, blood, etc., are kept within acceptable ranges.
Analytics, especially in terms of being able to predict problems before they occur, is the next big technology frontier. And Status Solution already is at work on new reporting and analytics tools.
New capabilities in this area will combine multiple data sources/streams with artificial intelligence in complex decision engines to aid in awareness and response.
