Beyond the typical technology solutions that are traditionally associated with security (video surveillance, access control, intrusion alarms, etc.), perhaps the most important tool at the disposal of security professionals are those that enable user-intuitive communications and collaboration capabilities in the field. Oftentimes, however, communication between field personnel and those working at headquarters or in a central command center are limited by a lack of connectivity.
Intellinote, which provides a cloud-based workspace tool to help streamline workflow processes for individuals and teams, is looking to solve this problem and recently announced a partnership with Virtual Defense and Development International (VDI), which has integrated its Virtual Management System (VMS) with the Intellinote solution.
According to Tony Lopresti, CEO of Intellinote and one of its three co-founders, said that the company was born out of their own personal frustration around building teams and getting people to work effectively together.
“Specifically, Intellinote is a cloud-based workspace for teams and individuals to accomplish anything,” explained Lopresti. “It is a place for capturing information. That information could be, in an inspection case, images and notes on physical facilities. It could also be documents, written notes, tasks, emails and all sorts of things. Intellinote allows that to be captured and accessed from any device, anytime and anywhere. And it allows people to collaborate around that information, to share and discuss around anything that’s captured. Finally, it is a place for completing work and we have all sorts of features to let people track tasks, track metrics and, ultimately, get work done.”
VDI has been in business since 1996 and provides specialized intelligence and security management operations primarily overseas, according to the company’s CEO Don Pepper. About two years ago, Pepper said that VDI developed its VMS solution as a way to really address customer needs by collecting and analyzing security incidents, track their assets and provide a better tool for crisis management. VDI launched VMS at one of their major client sites last year and recently began working with Intellinote to bring a field-based application to this security management software tool.
With one of its primary focuses being intelligence, Pepper said that many of VDI’s customers are U.S.-based companies with global operations. They also work with many foreign companies and their respective intelligence services, providing support and training. Additionally, Pepper said they place security managers in their clients’ organizations and that Intellinote has proven to be an invaluable information gathering tool in the field.
“Primarily before, as we had security managers going out to the field and looking at individuals handling security , doing audits and doing all of that, they were basically, I think as the industry does in general, collecting (information) on their computers, via recordings, notepads, taking pictures and then they were collating that back in the office,” said Pepper. “With the system that Intellinote built, first of all they’re disconnected, they don’t have to be connected to the Internet, they can take all of these notes on an iPad, they can take pictures that are geo-located and uploaded; everything gets put onto the iPad and then when they’re back and they have connectivity it all loads directly into the system. So, it has provided tremendous cost and time savings for us in terms of information collection. It also allows collaboration as they’re gathering the information and other people can look at what they’re doing, so from a management and collaboration standpoint it has been a real game changer.”
Since launching the product late last year, Lopresti said that there are already about 3,000 organizations using the cloud-based tool, which run the gamut from small businesses to Fortune 500 corporations.
“Our product, because it is so universally applicable to anybody that’s trying to organize information, capture tasks, collaborate, and get stuff done, it really serves lots of different use cases,” added Lopresti. “The way we go to market, however, is by looking at functional areas that could benefit from Intellinote. For example, inspection is certainly a big functional area that we’ve had multiple companies, large and small, utilize Intellinote for. We have inspectors within insurance organizations using Intellinote to document insurance claims. We have folks that are using Intellinote in a medical context to document accidents. We have folks that are using it to inspect operations for quality control purposes. All of that is in the inspection area, but we also have organizations using Intellinote in the marketing, sales and HR arenas.
Pepper said that Intellinote has enabled his personnel to directly view and collaborate online, but the most important feature of the solution for VDI is the offline interconnectivity it offers with their VMS platform.
“Now we have no data loss because it is uploaded directly in the field. If you’re doing an audit, a risk assessment, if you’re gathering incident data at the point that it is happening, that information is entered directly into the system and is uploaded automatically,” Pepper said.
Pepper said that VDI’s security managers have used Intellinote in 10 to 12 countries since its implementation and that the feedback they’ve received thus far has been extremely positive.
“You look at the way people do work today and it is largely in paper, email, meetings and discussions, so we’re trying to take it out of those mechanisms and into something that’s electronic , organized, collaborative, and available regardless of the function,” concluded Lopresti.
