Blogs

Prism Skylabs has raised another $7.5 milliion in funding, the company announced today. Here's a link to the story. I've put a call into founder Steve Russell, (also founder of 3VR) and expect I'll get a chance to speak to him in the next few day. Prism Skylabs, which offers a cloud service that "leverages data from existing video surveillance cameras to unlock information on customer patterns, trends and behaviors",  was launched just before ASIS 2012. Here's an ssnTVnews video interview I did with Steve Russell at ASIS 2012, where he talks about the company, and its first investment round ($1.5 million from the SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Eric Schmidt, Aaron Patzer, Brad Garlinghouse, CrunchFund and others)

It’s the season of spin. But no matter how you slice it, the opening paragraph of last week’s commentary by Hank Clemmensen, president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, isn’t a ringing endorsement of central stations.

“I always had supported remote station monitoring for my city’s fire alarms, both because I believed it would provide faster notification and because I believed central stations always take too long,” wrote Clemmensen, the fire chief in Inverness, Ill., on the website FireChief.com. “Phone calls between the central station operators and our PSAP take way too much time, and the conversations are vulnerable to errors.”

It’s tough to argue with that. The garbling of names and addresses has long been an issue for police and fire departments, and when is an emergency call ever fast enough? But it turns out that Clemmensen doesn’t have an ax to grind with the alarm community, as he quickly makes clear in hailing a top industry initiative: the Automated Secure Alarm Protocol.

“The interface allows a central station operator who has to notify a PSAP of an alarm to transmit all the information directly to that PSAP’s CAD screen with only a few keystrokes,” he said. “… Think about an operator from the Deep South talking to a PSAP call taker from New Jersey or Boston. Both are speaking English, but the languages are different. The interface transfers data without a telephone conversation—eliminating the chance of the PSAP call taker misunderstanding the central station alarm operator.”

Clemmensen goes on to praise the Central Station Alarm Association and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System for laying the necessary groundwork to secure the ASAP system. The computerized message broker for ASAP is at the Nlets facility in Phoenix.

“A core group of alarm companies financed the development and implementation of this system, and they are committed to getting jurisdictions with large numbers of alarms connected to ASAP,” he said.

Clemmensen’s take on the protocol has to be music to the CSAA’s ears. It also serves as a rallying point for other fire chiefs nationwide.

“Are you willing to reduce your response times by at least 1.5 to 3 minutes with quicker alarm notification and fewer errors? It sounds like a no-brainer,” he said. “The majority of fire alarms are not true emergencies, and if this new interface gets us the needed information sooner, responses could be modified. … This could just be one more tool to help reduce line-of-duty deaths and make sure everyone goes home.”

Security Systems News has written previously about plans that The ADT Corp has to add 150 new monitoring jobs at its Irving, Texas facility by the end of November.

But now that new independent company—which emerged from the recent breakup of Tyco International and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 1—also reportedly has plans to add 120 jobs at its headquarters in Boca Raton, Fla.

However, to create those Florida jobs, ADT is seeking as much as $1.62 million in state, county and local funding, according to the South Florida Business Journal.

Here’s some of what that publication had to say about the security giant, which it notes has revenues of more than $3 billion per year:
 

ADT Security Services received $1.24 million from the state in 2010 for creating 100 jobs as part of the construction of its Yamato Road headquarters. … On Tuesday, Palm Beach County commissioners will vote on whether to extend ADT an offer for $184,000 in job growth incentives. Boca Raton has pledged to give the company the same amount, while the state has offered ADT $1.25 million.
The money would be paid out over three years, should ADT create 120 jobs with annual salaries of $81,110, plus retain 260 current jobs. The company must also spend at least $400,000 retrofitting 175,000 square feet in its headquarters. … The regional economic model shown to the county states that ADT would have a $138 million economic impact over five years.

I’ve reached out to ADT to learn more about the jobs, the plan to redo its headquarters and why it’s asking for the public incentives. Stay posted!

A study by the MIT's Center for Information Systems Research gives Protection 1 kudos for Working Smarter.

At MIT, Working Smarter is a proper noun, a concept the group defines as having "an organization-wide habit of using a digitized platform to optimize each individual's contribution to enterprise business objectives."

MIT surveyed more than 200 public companies in 2010 and said that those who adhere to practices of Working Smarter "were significantly correlated with higher business impact from IT." Yeah, yeah, that's nice, but you'll be interested in this "and higher impact from IT was, in turn, significantly (and positively) associated with return on equity."

This is not a new study (it was released in February 2012), and Security Systems News has previously reported on many of the details of the Protection 1 operation, its daily scorecard, Tech Tracker, removing its IVR (getting a real person rather than a computer when you call) etc., nevertheless, I thought this report gave a nice snapshot of the operation.

Below are some paraphrased and quoted highlights:

The report says that P1 CEO Tim Whall "set out to explain how individual employees throughout the company could contribute to this goal [delivering outstanding customer service] —in other words, how they could work smarter."

Don Young, P1 CIO spent five months developing a daily scorecard on the metrics related to Whall's "five touchpoints that could make or break customer  relationships: sales, monitoring, billing , installation, and service response." Those metrics include: "Time to installation, time to service, number of sales activities, number of cancellations, retained monthly revenue, and new sales." The scorecard summary and detailed results can be accessed online by top executives, regional leaders and branch managers. They're updated every day and "Thus line managers have come to see it as a reliable guage of their daily operating performance."

The study says: "What's unique about Protection 1's scorecard is that it does not report financial data." This is particularly interesting to me. P1 execs have told me they do not talk to their employees about financial goals but about customer service. This study backs that up.

There's a quote in the study from Don Young: "The P&L will take care of itself if we make sure that the metrics on the scorecard are up to par." And, Joe Sanchez, SVP Operations, is quoted as saying: "There's no analysis paralysis going on here. You want to have a good day? You know what's on the scorecard."

The report says: "The power of the daily socrecard is that the underlying data can be traced back to the daily performance of front line workers."

In addition to removing the automated call system, Whall mandated that all calls be answered within 60 seconds, that service backlogs be eliminated, and that installers and techs show up on time for 8 a.m. appointments.

Technology improvements include Tech Tracker, and Sales Central, which automated the quote, approval, contract submission, record of sale, parts ordering and commission payments.

P1 execs, the report says, think of themselves as coaches rather than managers and offer leadership training to help develop coaching skills for all front line managers.

The report concludes: "In companies that are working smarter, leaders focus attention not on stock price or quarterly P&L, but on determining every day whether everyone is having a good day. Protection 1 achieves working smarter by: 1.developing and constantly enhancing the underlying information 2. articulating and, where appropriate, automating business expectations 3. clarifying individual accountabilties 4. persistently coaching individuals to ensure they understand how they contribute to business success. This is hard work. But if management doesn't commit to helping everyone work smarter, no company can expect its technology to lead to success in the digital economy."

Here's a description of CISR: It "conducts field-based research on issues related to the management and use of information technology (IT) in complex organizations. Established at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1974, our mission is to develop concepts and frameworks to help executives address the IT-related challenges of leading increasingly dynamic, global, and information-intensive organizations."

The authors of the report are Jeanne W. Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School’s Center for Information Systems Research, and Cynthia M. Beath, Professor Emeritus, University of Texas, Austin.