5 Step Plan for Managing Campus Security

No matter what the campus or district size, schools nationwide always ask me, “What is the best place for me to start when putting together a safety and security plan for my district?”  At first, managing campus security can seem like a daunting task.  There are many critical components to keep in mind.  The school districts that I have worked with that have seen the best success have worked through these five steps toward managing their security. 

Step One: Establish a Visual Identification Policy

How are you currently identifying your students, faculty, staff and visitors?  If your campus does not have a visual ID for each one of these people currently, get a plan in place quickly.  Establishing a visual ID is the first step toward a more secure campus.  It offers everyone in the building a sense of security and community.  It also makes faculty feel more comfortable approaching those who aren’t wearing a badge and escorting them to the front office to a visitor check-in station where they can present ID and be assigned a visitor badge. 

Step Two: Do Not Underestimate the Importance of Managing Visitors

Whatever you do, you should not underestimate the importance of identifying your visitors.  Visitors are a critical component to your campus security.  Unidentified visitors can pose a severe threat to any organization or campus and without a record of their name and the time they checked in, you can never account for them having been in your building should an incident ever occur.  By ensuring all visitors check in every time they show up on campus AND wear a visitor badge at all times, you can easily differentiate guests from faculty with just a quick glance at their ID.

Step Three: Conduct Random Assessments to Ensure Everyone is Wearing Their ID

Appoint someone in each school to randomly count how many staff and students they see that aren’t wearing their ID badges.  If the system is being utilized properly, that number should be zero.  I have seen many schools implement penalties for faculty and students seen not wearing their photo ID on school grounds (ex: fines, detentions, etc).  If you implement a badging system and never enforce it after the fact, it will inevitably fall by the wayside.  Random or quarterly assessments help ensure your investment is protected. 

Step Four: Start Thinking about Physical Security

When thinking about physical security, the best place to start is the perimeter.  Can you traffic all of your visitors to one main entry point?  Hopefully you can and all those guests are checking in at your visitor manager station(s).  If you have one main entry point, have you locked down all your other doors during the school day, thereby guaranteeing that you won’t have any unwarranted guests or visitors? 

In the event of an event of emergency, do you have a lockdown or evacuation plan in place?  At this point, you have already implemented student, faculty and visitor identification badges on campus.  Your visitor management system should offer you an accurate list of all of the visitors on campus at any given moment.  If you combine that list with your other credentials, you can come up with a fantastic plan for better managing your evacuation policy and procedures. 

Step Five:  Implement Other Applications that Use Your ID Badges

In this day and age there are so many things you can do with ID badges besides using them as a means for photo identification.  The opportunities are almost endless.  Take your ID card to the next level with applications like access control, vending, cafeteria solutions, mustering, single sign on, etc. 

There are hundreds of applications available to you!  Explore your options and discover new ways to secure your campus and ensure the safety of your students and faculty, keeping in mind that the more integrated the solutions you choose to implement are, the easier they will be to manage. 

There is no guaranteed way to manage campus safety, but following these steps will help to guide you to a safer and more secure district for both students and faculty. 

Lindsay Cornell is the Director of Sales for BadgePass, Inc.  BadgePass manufactures cutting edge ID Badging, Visitor Management and Access Control software.  Visit www.badgepass.com for more information. 

What's Your Plan?

I was speaking at an Open House event hosted by one of my resellers this week, when I posed the following question to the attendees, "How many of you have an evacuation plan or procedure in place at your facility currently?" As I expected, nearly everyone in the room raised their hands.

I continued, "Fantastic! Now how many of those plans include a policy for managing visitors in the building at the time of the evacuation?" I watched as all of the raised hands slowly went down.

Sadly, this was not very surprising to me.  Many customers I talk to on a daily basis are extremely proud of their lockdown or evacuation plans, yet they almost always forget to include visitors in those plans.  Why is that? Visitors are just as important as the employees or students or patients or whoever else may be in the facility at the time.  And an organization is just as liable for those visitors as they are for their own employees! Yet somehow it is the visitors who always seem to get overlooked.

As a group, we discussed this problem for a few minutes and I watched as a few people started to realize just how serious of an issue this could be for them and their organization.  I asked one of them, "Let's say you were visiting my company and there was a fire and I didn't have a proper plan in place to account for you while you were visiting. You would be pretty upset, wouldn't you?" He quickly nodded his head in agreement.

Another attendee volunteered that they don't necessarily have a plan for visitors, but they do have a paper log that lists all of the visitors that have signed in that day.  If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, but visitor log books will never be able to accurately account for who is actually in your facility.  There are dozens of reasons why, but here are my top two.

1. Visitors are almost never asked to present ID when signing in a log book, so you can't validate that they are who they claim to be.  (What is to stop me from signing in as Dr. Pepper?)

2. Many visitors view log books as a privacy concern because they are open for anyone to flip through and read, so if they don't use a false name, they sign the log illegibly. This prevents you from going back through and using that list of names for any reporting later on.

There are so many fantastic electronic visitor management solutions available today that customers can easily remedy the problem.  Furthermore, by integrating electronic  management with an access control solution, they would be able to gain a real time list of everyone that is in the facility at any given moment - from visitors to contractors to employees - essentially anyone that they might need to track in the event of an emergency.

Now that is what I call having a plan.

What Your Paper Log Book Says About Your Facility

Last week I visited a hospital to meet with a potential customer.  When I walked in, there were signs everywhere that read, “All visitors must sign in at Visitor Desk”.  Knowing what a potential risk unidentified visitors can pose to any facility, I was relieved to see that they had implemented a check in policy here. 

I followed the signs around the corner to the visitor check in station where I was greeted with a friendly smile and a paper log book.  A paper log?!  I couldn’t believe it.  Disappointed, I scribbled “Tinker Bell” in the log next to the time I arrived.  I told the woman behind the counter who I was here to meet with and she asked my name and called him to let him know I had arrived.  Not once did she ask to see my photo ID to verify I was who I claimed to be or did she check to ensure I signed in using that same name.  Once he was notified, she handed me a temporary visitor label that read VISITOR and asked me to take a seat in the waiting area.

While I waited for him to meet me, I silently watched similar interactions happen with the next five visitors.  Everyone who showed up was asked to sign in the paper log book, but not one person was asked to show any form of identification.  Once signed in, everyone was issued a generic visitor label and sent on their way to roam the hospital at their discretion. 

What are the biggest weaknesses of this system?

1.       Not once was there any validation of anyone’s ID

Without checking visitors' IDs and allowing them to simply sign the log as they please, you absolutely cannot guarantee an accurate record of who has been there.  I rarely use my real name in a log book.  If anything, I find paper logs to be an excellent opportunity to test my creative alter egos… Minnie Mouse, Doctor Pepper, Snow White… Whatever I choose, it certainly isn’t accurate.  And I guarantee I am not the only person doing this, which defeats the purpose of having the paper log in place to begin with!

2.       Anybody can read it

Why not just publish a list of everyone you do business with on your website for everyone to see?  A paper log is basically a public list of every person that has been in your building – vendors, contractors, parents, you name it… (Well those people using their real names anyway!)

3.       Log books are a hassle

What if an emergency or event ever happened and you actually had to rely on those logs for an accurate record of who was in your facility?  Going back through paper records manually to try to figure out who was in your building on a certain date at a certain time can be extremely frustrating, especially when compared to running an electronic report.   

Let’s face it; the paper log book is a completely antiquated way of managing visitor records.  Electronic visitor management offers a cost-effective method to securely track visitors, validate identities and run accurate reports, without the hassle!  The only downside is that as more and more facilities switch to electronic systems, I don’t get to make up as many fun names to sign in with anymore…

Lindsay Cornell is the Director of Sales for BadgePass, Inc.  BadgePass manufactures cutting edge ID Badging, Visitor Management and Access Control software.  Visit www.badgepass.com for more information.

Say Goodbye to Duplicate Medical Records

Duplicate medical records.  Say those three words to an IT Director or a CFO at any hospital in the country and I guarantee they will instantly cringe at the thought.  Despite their reaction, it is an ongoing nightmare that they are struggling with every single day. 

Why?  When Joseph Smith shows up on October 1^st, he is registered at Joseph Smith.  When he returns a month later for a different ailment, he is registered as Joe Smith.  He is clearly the same person, but now he is registered as two different “people” in the system.  Multiply that time millions of people times millions of hospitals.  We’re talking about a problem that is costing our hospitals billions of dollars every year. 

Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to simply scan Joe’s driver’s license the first time he showed up to the hospital and automatically populate his information into the system?  First name, Last name, Date of Birth, Address, Gender, Age… All of this information could be enrolled accurately and without any manual data entry errors.  Not to mention, extremely quickly!  Then, the next time he shows up at the same hospital, he can present his license again to search for his existing record to guarantee you don’t create a duplicate. 

Or here is an even better scenario.  What if you could create a loyalty card for Joe?  He could be issued a Patient ID card with his name and photo on it, along with a barcode so the next time he returned to the hospital, they could simply scan that card into the system to bring up his existing record.  Maybe that card could be used for special benefits in the hospital like discounts in the gift shop or a special line for faster patient registration.  Either way, it solves the issue of duplicate records and may even build some loyalty to your hospital or clinic. 

What are the biggest benefits of a Patient Loyalty solution?

1. It streamlines the enrollment process.
2. It reduces duplicate medical records.
3. It guarantees you pull up the correct patient record the moment they present their card.
4. It gives patients another reason to be loyal to your hospital or clinic. 

Hospitals all over the country are quickly adopting this Patient Loyalty solution.  The benefits drastically outweigh the costs.  Ask any IT Director to imagine his patient database without duplicate records.  Once he’s done chuckling, I guarantee he will smile…

Lindsay Cornell is the Director of Sales for BadgePass, Inc.  BadgePass manufactures identity and security software solutions including SmartReg, an Automated Enrollment application, as well as Identity Manager, Visitor Manager and Access Control. 

The Early Bird

Phillip King

Everyone is familiar with the old adage, “The Early Bird Gets the Worm.”  Well, the identification and security industry is no stranger to this claim.  My journey in this industry started as a high school student when I laughed at the notion that we couldn’t use our kitchen table to eat because my father was always testing new demo equipment on it.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this would eventually define my core business values and fuel my desire to succeed.  Two years later, I started my career in the identification industry and the rest is history. 

As I take a look back on my career so far, the times that are most memorable are the years just following new innovations in our market.  Fortunately, those times generated some of the greatest profit and growth for our company.  There was the invention of the color ID printer, flat card printing in casinos, hospital wristband printing and first responder credentialing – just to name a few.  All of these events represent defining changes in our company’s history.  Yet, these changes were not so favorable for other companies.  So I have to ask myself, why did some companies, like ours, prosper in the years following these changes while others watched their market share slowly slip away?

To answer this question, we must first understand that all products in our industry go through the same lifecycle.  In my experience, products evolve through four stages: Innovation, Product Release, Market Acceptance, Stabilization and then back to Innovation.  Some stay in the Stabilization stage until they become a commodity and others make it back around to Innovation again for continued development.  Of the four stages, the Market Acceptance stage is where the most products are sold and the very best profits are made.  After all, that’s why companies invest so many millions of dollars in Innovation to ensure they have the best products available. 

The best way to ensure maximum success during the Market Acceptance stage is to get in the game BEFORE a product has reached this level.  If you can get on board with a product as soon as it is released and devote the resources necessary to really succeed with it, you can truly take off with it once it develops Market Acceptance.  As a company, we have not always gotten on board with products as early as we should have. 

For many years, we mastered the patient identification business in our region, providing more than 90% market share in desktop card embossing.  In the late 1990s, laser printed wristbands and labels began to slowly make an introduction into our hospital market.  Before you knew it, hospital customers were falling to laser generated forms like dominos.  At first, we hesitated to accept this drastic change in the way we did business.  Once we realized the market was most definitely heading that direction, we regrouped and found new vendors and products to align ourselves with and ensured that our sales and support staff were properly trained.  In that year alone, our company grew over $ 500,000 in revenue and company profits skyrocketed.  When I reflect on the scenario today, I wonder what those numbers would have looked like had we gotten involved at an earlier stage in the game. 

A better example of a time that we got involved very early on was in 1993 when Datacard first released the color photo ID system.  As a Datacard dealer, we were fortunate to have access to a product long before many people knew what it was or what it would mean to the industry.  As a company, we took a big leap of faith and invested a lot of money in demo equipment, training and staff to support this new product.  We even spun off a completely separate company to focus on this product alone.  The major investment ended up paying off for us, and being an early adopter of this technology ended up completely changing our company’s future.  It taught me that the earlier you get involved when a new technology comes out, the more profitable you will be over the lifecycle of that product. 

What is changing in our market today? Identity Convergence, Tablet PCs, Cloud Computing, Security Convergence, Smartcard Technology, NFC, Smart Devices, Windows 8, etc… The future is now!  What technologies are you and your company investing in?  Align yourself with industry leaders that are changing the game.  If you invest the resources necessary to succeed, you will win big in the long run. 

Phillip King is Vice President of ID Group, Inc., a local identification and security integrator in Mississippi and Louisiana and President of BadgePass, Inc., a developer of ground-breaking software solutions for the identity and security industry.

Connect with Phillip on LinkedIn