By: Stephan R. Sutor – Product Group Director, Operations Center, Genetec
Twenty years ago, operators were focused on monitoring video feeds, locking and unlocking doors, and responding to alarms. However, security professionals today are doing more than monitoring feeds in a control room. They’re increasingly embedded in the core of organizational operations, playing a visible, strategic role beyond traditional surveillance.
While responding to incidents remains an important part, security operators contribute to many day-to-day operational activities that impact their entire organizations, not just their own departments. This could include crisis planning, employee safety, and business continuity.
It’s more than a change of job description: it’s a fundamental transformation in the ways security departments contribute to strategic success.
Integration with business management tools
As the responsibilities of security teams evolve, outdated workflows are starting to show their cracks. Many organizations still rely on spreadsheets, paper forms, and shared inboxes to manage critical tasks — tools that weren’t built for real-time collaboration or cross-departmental visibility.
When different teams are working with disconnected systems, even simple tasks — like sharing an incident report or planning for an event or activity — can require many emails, time-intensive data entry, and manual follow-ups. These inefficiencies slow down decision-making and increase the risk of errors or missed information.
Other industries have already tackled this problem. Manufacturing, logistics, and software development have embraced integrated work management tools that streamline communication and align team efforts. The security world can learn from these examples.
Kanban-style work management systems allow different individuals, teams, and departments to manage their own workflows, while contributing to a shared operational picture. This balance — local autonomy with centralized visibility — is essential in complex environments where many teams need to work in sync but still maintain their own pace and priorities.
By adopting a flexible work management system, such as Genetec Operations Center, security teams can better coordinate across departments, reduce administrative overhead, and ensure that the growing scope of their work is supported by processes that match their strategic importance. Teams can also maintain tamper-proof audit trails, securely manage evidence connected to investigations, maintain regulatory compliance, and protect sensitive and personally identifiable data.
Case study: simplyfing operations across campus
Brigham Young University (BYU) is located on a 560-acre campus in Provo, Utah and home to nearly 34,000 students and over 5,000 faculty and staff. The university’s robust security program includes 25 sworn officers, 15 security supervisors, and up to 400 student employees.
To better coordinate multiple departments and manage a broad range of responsibilities, BYU sought a solution that would unify operations and improve efficiency. The team needed to streamline communication between shifts, team members, and other departments. Information had to be secure, easy to access, and shareable.
BYU integrated Genetec Operations Center with their existing Security Center platform, enabling the university to consolidate tasks like dispatching, work ticketing, and activity tracking into a single system. This streamlined approach replaced disconnected tools and manual processes, helping teams collaborate more effectively and maintain clear visibility of their operations.
BYU has now automated several key processes. For example, routine tasks such as nightly code checks across campus divisions, equipment inspections, and building audits are now scheduled and managed automatically. This reduces the workload on dispatchers, minimizes the potential for errors, and ensures tasks are completed consistently. The mobile app also enhances situational awareness for field officers, providing real-time updates on assignments and facilitating compliance with operational procedures.
The flexible design of their system allows BYU to customize workflows and reports to suit specific departmental requirements. From tracking officer locations to managing inventory and generating incident documentation, the platform adapts to support the diverse needs of the university’s security teams.
The human side of change
No transformation succeeds without people on board. How change is introduced — and how it’s rolled out — can make or break its success. For most organizations, gradual implementation works best: test a specific use case in a pilot project, refine it with real-world feedback, and then improve and scale what works.
Once the new system is proven and operators are comfortable, you can gradually introduce new features that empower staff to improve workflows and make better decisions. Change will always create friction, but managed well, it builds confidence and momentum.
Software vendors can play a valuable role in this process. Through their work with many customers, they can offer insight, curate best practices, and suggest templates to follow, reducing your team’s learning curve.
Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s the result of creative explorations of vendors, customers, channel partners, other stakeholders, and consultants who are driven to experiment with new technologies and systems to do things most others have not yet thought of. The evolution of the role of the security operator and that of the software developer is happening together.
Ultimately, success will depend not only on adopting better systems — but also on investing in the people who use them. Security operators are becoming strategic contributors to organizational safety, resilience, and decision-making. Empowering them with training, trust, and a voice in the process is the real foundation for sustainable change.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephan co-founded KiwiSecurity in 2008, a company that specialized in video analytics software, bridging security and privacy, which was later acquired by Genetec. Joining the Genetec R&D team and collaborating with key customers, Stephan was able to push the boundaries of the Genetec product portfolio and drive innovation regarding operational efficiency, which led to the creation of a new team and product, Genetec Operations Center, which he leads today. He has a master’s degree in computer graphics and digital image processing from the Vienna University of Technology, as well as a PhD in Information Processing Science from the University of Oulu, Finland, for his work on large-scale video surveillance systems.