My son starts college this fall, and last week, my wife and I drove him to campus for orientation. I wasn't there to write anything, and I certainly wasn't looking for a story. I was just a parent, walking in and out of buildings, half-listening to tour guides, doing the thing every parent does on these trips: Quietly scanning the place where your kid is about to live without you.

Somewhere between the second dorm and the third academic building, the editor in me woke up anyway, because I couldn't stop noticing the technology disparity all around us.

This is a product of working in our industry. We all do it: We look up when everyone else is looking forward, squinting at PTZ dome rings to see a brand name.

As we walked, I saw a sleek panoramic unit mounted in the lobby of one building; an older PTZ from a different manufacturer entirely in the next. A door with a badge reader that looked like it had been installed a decade ago, right beside an eye-catching modern smart lock.  

None of it was hidden or strange. It was just there – the way it is on every campus that's been built, renovated, and rebuilt one grant and one budget cycle at a time. I've understood that as a security editor, but never as someone's father. And I have to admit that what I felt at that moment was vulnerability.

I need to be careful here, because disparate technology on a campus isn’t big news to anyone reading this magazine, and it isn't a knock on the school my son will be attending. You've spent careers making technology patchworks like this function, but what I didn't expect was how different the fragmentation feels when you're just a parent trying to gauge, in 15 seconds per hallway, whether a place is actually safe for your kid. You think: I sure hope they have some effective way to use all of this stuff to its full potential.

I have no idea if the old badge reader or the mismatched cameras were underperforming. The vulnerability I felt was in the gaps between them, in whatever might not be getting handed off cleanly from one system's view to another's.

This magazine has spent real ink lately on the industry's effort to close that gap via interoperability and standardization (including PKOC, Aliro, Matter, Onvif, OSDP – the list goes on), and I believe in that effort. But standing in that hallway, I also understood something that can’t be fully conveyed in an article: That even a good standard takes years to reach an actual building.

The dorm with the old badge reader isn't getting retrofitted because a new specification got published in February; it's getting replaced on whatever timeline the budget allows.

That's an uncomfortable thing to sit with as an industry editor who wants to believe progress arrives faster than it does. I understand now, in a way I didn't a month ago, why the work integrators do is about more than the path to greater profits – it's the difference between a campus that feels secure and one that just looks like it should be.