Digitisation will change the way we think about building access

Lee Copland, Managing Director, Maxxess EMEA

Full digitization of access control and visitor management has much to offer major public sector organisations and large enterprises with multiple sites and dispersed staff making duty of care and a drive to increase operational efficiency a top priority.

In the public sector, we are already seeing proof of concept trials with this more ambitious digitisation of physical security and safety processes that have so far remained separate and siloed. The aim is to link together physical access with corporate data systems, including HR functions based on the likes of Microsoft Active Directory that have long been digital.

Any organisation with lots of people to manage, be that staff, contractors, guests or the public, stands to gain from this emerging generation of more efficient, comprehensive digitised solutions. And the benefits won’t just be for large scale entities: digitised solutions are already benefitting  medium sized organisations, and even those with single, stand-alone sites to manage.

For individual users, building access is becoming as frictionless – literally – as network access.

The technology is well proven but now, post-pandemic, there is more ambition in the scale of digitisation as customers push to make fully integrated access solutions a reality.

For the security sector this is a big step forward, even though most established access control vendors aren’t heavily involved yet. One major public sector organisation looking for digitisation suppliers recently went out to tender, and found few systems integrators and access vendors bidding for the project. Their technology offering had not yet been developed to meet the criteria of the proposed proof of concept.

To date, it’s the ICT specialists who have been leading the way, because they have exactly the right experience to do it: working across multiple disciplines to create operating systems where everything works seamlessly – corporate databases, video, intruder, fire, access, building services and specialist functions. Previously, management platforms which were customised and highly user-specific or would have been provided only by sophisticated PSIM vendors. Now though, cloud-based fully flexible, and modular approaches are bringing prices down and opening up the market.

So it’s typically among the more nimble developers where the most ambitious innovations are being tested.

And where they are working on larger scale trials the potential impact on the market is huge, particularly in those early-adoption sectors such as transportation, hospitality, office developments, and hospitals.

There are significant efficiencies to be gained by speeding up day to day tasks – for example maintaining access and ID authorisations, granting and revoking digital passes, managing and checking-in on remote staff, streamlining deliveries, allocating workspace resources, booking-in guests, even automating building systems to align with occupancy.

When these efficiencies are multiplied across large workforces and dispersed estates the savings are set to be huge.

Why is this drive to innovate happening now?

Across the many public sector organisation in EMEA, there is a new push towards connecting and collaborating, and away from the old model of competing in artificial internal markets.

This is being driven partly by cost, and partly by a recognition that joined-up working between agencies delivers better results and improved care outcomes. Digitising manual processes is one way of streamlining workflows and reducing pressure on staff who are already in short supply. That pressure is unlikely to be solved entirely by increased government funding – at least not in the short term – because there’s not enough additional money and it can’t come fast enough to ease the stresses on existing infrastructure and resources.

So ministries, local authorities, health providers, social services, and private sector organisations are being encouraged to share information, services, and facilities.

In the UK, with internal markets the aim was to drive efficiency through competition, but the reality often failed to live up to the promise.  Competing public sector bodies were motivated to go their own way, with their own IT infrastructure and siloed back end systems, and not to share. They were encouraged to out-perform each other.

But that approach has fallen out of favour and the pandemic has highlighted the benefits of collaborative working. In England, new integrated care solutions are being developed with collaboration between organisations planning, buying and providing publicly-funded healthcare. As well as NHS trusts, those organisations include local authorities and independent care providers.

The public are already seeing changes, for example with the Patient Access application now connecting them to a range of services from booking GP appointments, vaccine jabs to ordering repeat prescriptions and receiving tailored healthcare advice.

The move towards collaboration doesn’t mean that decentralisation is being abandoned altogether. Decentralised control proved its value during the pandemic, with local management often proving more effective than top down efforts.

But the difference in the public sector now is that once an innovation has been tested and proved it’s more likely to be shared between agencies. Common, integrated systems are more likely to emerge.

Where digitised access and visitor management control is concerned this might mean social workers, care workers, or council officers being given digital passes to come into major hospital facilities when they need to.

The result will be that thousands of employees will no longer have to go through time consuming ID and authorisation procedures day after day, or struggle with different physical ID passes for separate buildings and facilities, even within the same organization.

Solutions are already available for these access control and visitor functions to happen more seamlessly. The market is moving, and there are huge savings to be made.