control rooms
Future-proofi ng command and control
David Taylor talks to Simon Read of APD Communications about the future of control room technology and a more fl exible alternative to the traditional ICCS
The police command and control room for Stockholm County, one of the regional hubs connected to the national Rakel TETRA network in Sweden
T
he TETRA landscape has been dominated recently by talk of how LTE will aff ect the future of critical communications. However, technological
advancements are having an eff ect across the board, not least in the control room and contact centre. Simon Read, business development director at APD
Communications, believes things are changing fast and the traditional proprietary hardware Integrated Communications Control System (ICCS) is a thing of the past.
“T ese are things that I’ve heard people say over the nine
years I’ve been at APD: the ICCS is a comms system, not an IT application; it’s complicated; it needs specialist equipment; it uses proprietary hardware; it’s diff erent from other applications; it needs replacing every 10 years; it is just in the control room; it needs its own dedicated PC. “Every one of those is a myth. It used to be true 10 years
ago when the tenders came out initially in the UK; every one of those is now false.”
The operational perspective Simon believes you can look at this from two perspectives: an operational and a technical perspective. “From a user’s point of view, their job is changing”, he
continues. “It’s morphing daily but also over a longer period of time it’s changed considerably and will do so increasingly with more multimedia and focus on customer service. T ere is more focus on public interaction than in the past, so making sure it meets the needs of the lady or the man sitting in front of the workstation, is of paramount importance.” APD has conducted several workshops with users around
Simon Read is business development
director at APD Communications
36
the world and found fl exibility is the key to keeping operators happy. People want to have a user customizable design but they still want the ability to keep a certain structure to make it easy to use. “Operators in the control room have diff erent roles.
Traditionally call-taker, and dispatcher, but there are many other roles – supervisors, CCTV operators, front counter staff , access control operators, multimedia monitoring.
TE TRA TODAY Issue 14 2013
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