March 2, 2023 - Does your control room equipment perfectly fit your needs? Then you are an exception. Only 16% of control room professionals indicated they would change absolutely nothing in their working environment. This is one of the many striking conclusions of Barco's Global Control Room Report. We asked over 1000 control room professionals worldwide about their needs, aspirations and working conditions. To get a complete overview, we consulted control room managers, operators, IT staff and C-level decision-makers. In the next few weeks, we will elaborate on some of the most noteworthy results.

#1. Good. But not good enough

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.

Does this mean there is no room for improvement? Certainly not! Only 16% of professionals would make no changes at all to their control room if they were in charge. 'I would change some things' was the most popular answer here, with over 50% of the votes. Surprisingly, especially the management-level respondents are eager to 'Change everything' (7%). This probably means that 'budget' is a big obstacle for change

#2. Security: an overall top priority moving forward

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.

And the importance of high-performing security is only increasing. Nearly 60% of respondents indicate that cybersecurity has become a bigger issue over the past 2 years. This is a clear message to all manufacturers.

#3. The secret of success?

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.