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Video Surveillance Systems: Reality TV

The reasons to invest in new video surveillance systems are everywhere. Zoom in on these six insights to help you focus on what's important and what's just hype.

Bowens wouldn't provide many details of his system, but he did talk about some of the benefits of upgrading. Decision support data from video on whether to evacuate a terminal now can be had in 10 seconds, whereas with CCTV and tape, it might have taken minutes or more. And if Bowens manages to avoid unnecessarily evacuating a terminal just two times, the system will have paid for itself.

Still, Bowens was strict in what he bought to enter the modern surveillance age. "The vendors freak out when they get to an airport," Bowens says, "because we are not 'wow' motivated. We buy what we need, and we tell them it has to run for at least 10 years."

Along with Bowens, Ramos says he knows of some executives who have taken a less disciplined approach. "You know, guys in high-margin businesses who can get away with mushy ROI, they see all these gadgets. I see a lot of people getting taken in by the wow factor," he says. By wow factor, Ramos, whose business is decidedly low-margin, means not only the hardware but the advanced applicationssuch as face recognition and behavior pattern analysis. Hardly anyone, Ramos says, could possibly know whether they can cost-justify some of these new applications yet. Never mind whether they even need them.

Ramos also adds that the Wowists aren't considering hidden and tangential costs that will creep up with digital systems (see "Five ROI Rules of Thumb," Page 45), such as staff retraining, bandwidth and security.

"Don't get me wrong, the demos are beautiful. Just consider me from Missouri," says the European-born Ramos. "Show me this stuff up and running in the real world. And show me what it really gives me. Getting video to my cell phone is really incredible; at what point do I really need that? The wow factor should come last, basically."4 The High Price of Buying into the Wow FactorWow breeds ineffectiveness; a bad technical deployment will create support costs. A lack of planning for business processes to guide alarms will spur false alarms. Over time, false alarms are ignored, increasing the risk that a real alarm will be ignored. Eventually, a real alarm is ignored, and the investment has failed. It will create inefficiencies. "What you end up with," says surveillance consultant Jones, "is a lot of wasted datavolumes and volumes of it."

Wow also encourages information overload. The economics of video infrastructure allow you to put up as many cameras as you like. But how many cameras does it take to generate an unmanageable amount of visual data?