Identifying the Right Integrations for Flexible Workplace Solutions
When an organization introduces any new solution to its facility, it cannot afford to rely on one powerful tool to do all the work.
Integrations are a crucial aspect of any modern and technical business. As businesses in each industry are managing increasingly more complex systems, a shift towards unified automation across integrated workplace solutions is now essential to stay competitive.
The integrations an organization chooses to implement will be useful for linking software to external applications or platforms. The connections from these integrations make it possible to safely exchange data, ideally providing an organization with new features and functionality.
Facility Needs Integrated Solutions
When an organization introduces any new solution to its facility, it cannot afford to rely on one powerful tool to do all the work. It must build up further resources in the form of integrated solutions capabilities.
The need for system integrations is immediate. An organization will have other systems in place such as security, access control and human resources (HR) management tools. Issues arise between all systems when they are all operating separately; it makes keeping track of all systems virtually impossible. The right integrations, however, can streamline an organization’s day-to-day processes and help everything connect quickly.
One example of how integrated solutions and features can improve a workplace is through enhanced security measures. The lack of integration between physical and cybersecurity creates a fundamental weakness in both systems within the workplace.
With the security team solely focused on physical threats, they fail to account for potential security breaches surrounding data theft; with the cybersecurity team focused on threats to personal data contained within IT systems, it often fails to consider visitor data managed by the security teams.
Implementing an integration-rich solution is preparing a workplace for the future. To avoid neglecting specific needs that are not as relevant today as others but will be eventually, it’s best practice to pick a workplace platform or enterprise suite of workplace management tools that will constantly develop new integrations of various subsystems into a single, unified architecture to fit your end customers’ needs.
This process of creating integrated systems produces greater functionality and performance across all the separate components.
Choosing Wisely Among Integrations
A vast amount of integrations in different categories is available to power an organization’s software capabilities. What is the right mix to operate optimally for and end user’s staff and personnel? Whether it’s implementing integrated solutions to develop out host notification software, directory services, HR software, security and access solutions, watchlists or sales and marketing technology, a secure visitor management solution should be powered with all.
Here are some of the possibilities:
- Watchlist integration—Every security team has one main goal, and that is to protect its facilities and the people in and around them. A layered approach is best to accomplish that goal. One of the most important layers is an automated approach to querying local, state, and international databases and screening visitors’ names against thousands of sex-offenders lists, arrest records, court records, watch lists, sanctioned/banned lists, etc.Security teams are equipped to vet red-flag notifications and make better critical decisions in real time, providing organizations with a powerful resource for protecting their people and places. U.S. Department of Homeland Security Support Anti-Terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies (SAFETY) Act designations and certifications can help guide organizations to effective solutions.
- Guest notification integration — Security can be augmented by being able to notify visitors, in addition to staff, during a critical event. When a visitor checks into a facility, that record can be synchronized with a mass alert system, for example. Emergent solutions can type and group these contact records for filtering and push out notifications to active contacts if any emergency event happens. Application programming interface (API) calls can be made to remove the contact once the visitor checks out.
- Security and access integration — Innovative facial recognition technology can be integrated for a frictionless access experience with no requirement of radio frequency identification (RFID) cards or soft labels. Market-leading solutions employ deep neural networks to perform highly accurate face matching in real time through techniques such as identifying spatial inconsistency and using arrays of sensors to create three-dimensional maps to eliminate spoofing and fooling the system.When visitors are invited to a facility, they upload images before they arrive, and, once they check in onsite, their images are synchronized with the integrated system to allow frictionless access. A person’s face serves as access credential.
Helping End Customers Become a Powerful Enterprise
With any software integration, it’s easy to separate systems and applications, enabling users to bring different products and departments together and make business processes more efficient and secure. Providing new integrations focused on access control and security, watch lists and other workplace software solutions is key to implementing a strong, robust workplace solution.
Developing an integration-rich solution with the flexibility for redeveloping and repowering involves certain challengers: first, managing the evolving tension between reinforcing the company’s core business and redirecting strategy; second, managing the sharing and transferring of resources among business units.
But, with all this considered, when all integration capabilities are implemented and business needs are met, organizations are primed to become a leading and powerful enterprise.
Stephen Bishop is Chief Technology Officer for Dublin, Ireland-based TDS.
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