With high profile security projects, like the World Trade Center, there has been a call for establishing standards in the security industry. The WTC project brought several manufacturers together to build a security infrastructure with systems that were not originally designed to work in conjunction with one another. This is where a set of standards would prove useful.
However, while this would seemingly make things easier for end-users, manufacturers are leery to share their intellectual property with their direct competitors. So it becomes a question of customer service vs. business strategy. Do you risk giving away strategic information to increase the ease-of-use for end-users or do you stay guarded and let the consumer worry about their own needs?
This is the question that has been plaguing the security industry for quite some time. But is that even the case?
While the WTC project saw a flurry of cooperation amongst competing security manufacturers, the level of information they needed to share was not as revealing as you may think. Manufacturers did not have to give away intimate details about their products in order to form a successful security infrastructure. So establishing security standards may not require as much “revealing” as manufacturers originally feared. And the result of this collaborative effort was a much more user-friendly, effective security system.
“There is tremendous power in partnering. Great things can be accomplished when resources are pooled to solve challenges,” said Christy Haycraft, national integrator manager for UTC Fire & Security.
So there may be hope for establishing security standards after all.
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Sources:
The Push for Standards Security Systems News