Future-proofing command and control

The Tetra landscape has been dominated recently by talk of how LTE will affect the future of critical communications. However, technological advancements are having an effect 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.

“These 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 different 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. There 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 the world and found flexibility 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 different roles. Traditionally call-taker, and dispatcher, but there are many other roles - supervisors, CCTV operators, front counter staff, access control operators, multimedia monitoring. It’s important to be able to have user-interfaces that are customizable to meet these roles, not to have a rigid one-size-fits-all.”

A good example of this can be found in the control room of the Swedish Police Force. Simon explains: “They don’t have touch screens - their unions say they’re not allowed because of repetitive strain injury, believe it or not - and they have three 27-inch monitors in front of them. Their apps all run off one PC: competitor’s apps, partner’s apps, all morphed into the environment they want, specific to them. They swipe in at their desk and it animates and changes the location of their apps across their screens to their preference.

“And that’s what the users want, that’s what they tell us - access to resources wherever and whenever. When they want to get access to a resource - whether it’s contact history, telephony, Tetra, CCTV - it’s there and it’s there immediately.”

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