I recently had the opportunity to help out with the PPM exhibit at the Annual OACUSA (Ontario Association of College and University Security Administrators) Conference where I was able to connect with a number of campus security professionals.
Having come from a campus security background prior to my move to PPM as one of their application specialists—and having since then worked on a number of higher education implementations of Perspective—it’s always great to reconnect to talk about their incident management systems and what other interesting and new things schools are doing to keep their campuses secure. Thinking back to my time with the campus police at the University of Western Ontario, I can speak firsthand to how valuable Perspective can be in this type of environment. In fact, my fellow application specialist and PPM colleague, Melissa Davis, CPP (who also comes from a campus security background) and I often find ourselves speaking to various benefits of using Perspective for higher education. Let’s talk about a few that really stand out.
Streamlining the accreditation process
Universities often need to meet a range of local or federal requirements, such as the Clery Act, including proof through documentation. Some accreditations stipulate two or three hundred requirements, each of which needs documentation to prove compliance. This can be anything from maintaining publicly available crime logs with certain types of data, publishing yearly security reports detailing the state of security and the effectiveness of campus safety programs, or preparing breakdowns of years of statistics on various types of crimes. This becomes even more challenging for universities with multiple campuses that must meet the legal requirements of more than one locality, state/province, or country.
Attempting to organize and manage this much data in Excel spreadsheets (or worse, in filing cabinets) can be a full time job. In our experience, Perspective dramatically lightens the load by simplifying input and automating the organization of incident data—which can include parking tickets, HR records, staff complaints, or police reports—and letting you generate the reports you need from one central repository.
Unifying information and making department budgets go further
Within the university itself, general administrators and individual departments can also benefit. Budget cuts are an unfortunate reality for universities, and thefts, damage and other losses place an additional burden on cash-strapped departments. Perspective incident management can provide a level of detail that contract security providers can’t match: by allowing users to aggregate and organize data from multiple sources, Perspective can track losses back to individual departments and identify areas of greater risk. Better yet, staff can point to Perspective’s data to illustrate the effectiveness of training, orientations, and loss prevention workshops—not to mention countermeasures—in reducing losses and freeing up budget dollars. That’s invaluable for job security.
More broadly, Perspective increases the potential value of data gathered by individual departments. Universities are traditionally very siloed communities, and even individual departments often don’t share data with other departments (though this has started to change in recent years). Fortunately, Perspective allows efficient data sharing when needed with a flexible data segregation and application security structure that encourages collaboration while ensuring stringent controls on who sees what (both by user and by incident). For instance, a university’s HR, security, or student services department can log and track data independently from the other departments. But, if an incident occurs that requires multiple types of information held by different departments (e.g., involving staff, visitors, and students), Perspective is able to combine the data from these departments to provide a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of the incident and those affected.
Trending, integration, and security
Managing security operations for a college or university is a serious undertaking—it means managing security not just for an organization, but for a diverse population that is representative of an entire community. That can mean dealing with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students, staff, local residents, and visitors. And like communities, universities must be prepared to respond to a range of incidents, from parking tickets to drug trafficking, assault and even fatalities, making effective incident management and response that much more critical.
Perspective’s robust integration ability offers great flexibility and utility for security personnel (you can find some other examples of Perspective integrations and customizations here). On one level, Perspective can provide a sort of one-stop shop that lets security personnel monitor the dispatch log, check up on investigations, review video footage, report to other campus departments, or request an officer. It’s critical for security personnel to be able to rapidly respond to an incident, and seconds matter. The ultimate goal of course isn’t just responding to incidents, but preventing them entirely—and that’s where Perspective’s trending abilities come in.
But it’s in the long term where Perspective’s value becomes even more apparent—the more data you add to Perspective, the more you enhance its capabilities. You can log incidents and classify them by type, add information about the persons involved, incorporate data on other crimes suspects have been involved in, track where thefts are occurring, help make sense of this information through a timeline, and effectively focus your resources on vulnerable areas. Across the board, the possible ways to utilize Perspective are amazingly expansive. But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense—you can’t expect to effectively stop or respond to incidents if you don’t know what’s happening.
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