84% of control room professionals would change their control room if they could

We kicked it off with a blunt question: “How would you rate your control room?” A very interesting conclusion we could take from our survey, is that this highly depends on the size. Small control rooms (up to 5 operators) score a bleak 5.5/10. This gradually rises to a satisfying 7.5 for environment with more than 25 operators. This is a pretty decent score, considering the challenging situations the control room staff often faces.

Now, money set aside, what would be the most desired subject of change to make the control room future ready? The top answer here is ‘Security resilience’ (43%), closely followed by ‘Predicting issues before they do harm’ (42%). ‘Optimizing incident response’ (39%) completes the top 3. It may not come as a surprise, but for IT managers and C-level decision-makers, security was even higher on the radar.

Finally, what defines the success of a control room? Is it preventing that an issue becomes a crisis? That the right people are at the right moment on the right location? No, these are the numbers 2 (with 46%) and 3 (42%) respectively. The top answer here is “When we can quickly and effectively respond to the alerted issues” (51%). More reactive than proactive, so to speak.