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How new technology can sometimes fail to meet your expectations... or does it?
When I first walked through the branch location of a New England-based financial institution with its corporate security director, we were reviewing and discussing general security concerns when our conversation and attention became focused on the new digital video recording system they had recently invested in. This was a system that is popular and is, in part, made for the needs of financial institutions. However, its performance was well below expectations—the system was less than a year old and was not meeting the image quality or duration of recording that was promised by the vendor who had originally installed it, leaving the security director with two issues to manage:
- We made this investment in a few locations and now feel committed to moving forward with the rest of our sites as we cannot afford to make another change
- We seem forced or are resigned to the fact that the investment will not pay off for us as expected.
Our conversation led to a broader discussion of and the differences between providers that primarily sell and install equipment and offer service as a necessary evil, and companies that not only specialize in service, but additionally have thorough understanding of the clients’ needs and the technology to achieve almost any result (and certainly the minimal expectations he and his organization desired, especially from the system they invested in at several sites).
We agreed to have one of our technicians visit the site within the next few days to make the necessary adjustments to both the cameras and the video recorder. He seemed skeptical: he had been assured that this in fact was the best that could be done. So if we could make the necessary changes/fixes to get his system where he wanted it to be, then why couldn’t his current company? A question we will answer in a moment.
The next day one of our field staff stopped by the branch at the prearranged time (we were a little early) and after about two hours we were not only able to improve the individual views of each camera in the branch location, we were also able to improve the image quality of the recorded images, as he put it, “by 100%” while extending the length of time images were being saved/stored.
Seeing is believing! The proof is in the pudding as they say. This was an easy fix: a little know-how and a bit of experience can produce significantly different results with the same equipment.
Whether it is newer technology or older legacy systems, the same principles apply: don’t give up on your systems or the investments you have made. Stop settling for “good is good enough,” demand more, raise the bar. There is always a way to get the result.
Oh and as far as the answer to that question as to why could we, when they could not? Well for me, its not that they couldn’t, they just simply don’t. Hard to believe that is the philosophy for many companies these days, convincing you day in and day out how difficult and costly your requests are, distracting you with technical jargon to change the conversation, and get the focus off of them and onto anything else. There is always room for improvement.
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