The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 forced many control rooms teams to be creative with their operations and workflows. To respect social distancing rules and prevent people from getting sick, many control room teams opted to allow at least a part of their workforce to work from home. Suddenly, control room operators needed to be able to share and monitor content securely beyond the control room.

But even before COVID-19, the need for control room operators to have remote access to critical information systems had already become evident. Today, organizations are increasingly expecting an always-on mentality from their workforce. Control room managers and executives therefore need 24/7 situational awareness, and they need to be able to make crucial decisions in real time to increase safety, enhance productivity, or keep costs under control.

Fortunately, IT technology has been enabling remote working for years, as operations have become more decentralized and dispersed. COVID-19 has only given these technologies a push and, just like in other consumer and business markets, adoption of remote-working technologies is rapidly increasing among control room users.

Remote access to information systems used to be mainly a privilege of field engineers, patrol vehicles, first responders, and the likes. What has changed today, is that the tasks that were typically performed in the confined space of the control room, now also need to be performed in collaboration with remotely located operators and field workers, be it in a smaller, separate control room or from home.

For control room operators, being location independent, has a number of advantages:

That does not mean that remote operations do not come with their own set of challenges. For starters, with a control room workforce that has become so dispersed, it has become even more critical to manage the content streams securely across all distributed locations. Control rooms were always designed to be moated sites, but the aversion to become connected was more and more becoming an obstacle. Granted, the assurance of a proven and secure solution never existed... until now.

In addition, fast and well-informed decisions require that remote stakeholders on both ends of the communication channel share the same view and see the available information in exactly the same way. Whether they are working from home on their laptop or looking at the overview wall in the control room, they need the same real-time and distributed Common Operational Picture.

Fortunately, technology can help control room operations to become more location independent. For example, streaming solutions such as Barco SecureStream make sharing content from the control room to external stakeholders – be it home office workers or remote control room operators – easy and secure. And with operator workspace solutions, such as Barco OpSpace, the operator’s personalized workspace settings − preferred applications and signals on the preferred locations – can be loaded to a workstation at any connected location.

Jordan Heldrich Segment Marketing Manager of Control Rooms

Jordan focuses on control rooms at Barco utilizing her multi-industry knowledge and experience in sales, product marketing and strategic marketing to bring dynamic strategies to control rooms.  She is based in Atlanta, GA.