Author: Thomas Norman
ISBN No: 0-7506-7909-3
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 0
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
Year of publication:
Brief:
Integrated Security Systems Design by American Thomas Norman, is really rather impressive.
It’s aimed, so Norman lays out at the start, at system design consultants and project managers, who build complex systems; and the building owners and security and facilities directors who operate them. By integrated we are talking alarms, access control, CCTV, voice communications, parking control and so on, mostly using TCP/IP. Applications, then, are ports, multiple sites, campuses. Norman is quite blunt about what he sees as yesterday’s and today’s (and tomorrow’s) technology. Today there is IT-based technology thagt reduces costs, allows central monitoring of security and other parts of the business, and in Norman’s words, if you are in security and afraid of and resisting change, you will lose. After whizzing the reader through some history, Norman gets stuck into electronic security, not forgetting a chapter on physical security (‘There is no security without physical security … Understanding door types is basic to designing access control’). Next Norman gets stuck into security design before the section on information technology. “The designer is at the mercy of installers and physics, both of which can harm him or her. Not understanding TCP/IP is like not being able to read or write.” As the writer is in the field – to be precise, working in Texas and Beirut – besides having a knack for the easy to grasp metaphor he offers real-world examples. Hence don’t forget encryption or other network security for your TCP/IP-based system. And don’t do without a schedule of maintenance. At the end, he warns that the electronics are a tool, to assist, not to replace security people. Segregate the guard managers from the electronic monitoring, and guards won’t be told of information from the console operators, and guards won’t know that the operators are taking naps! It’s unavoidably jarring that Norman writes in American English for an American audience, but striking that he argues that a police background is not generally suitable for corporate security management. Instead he says: “Some of the finest managers I have seen come from the US State Department Diplomatic Security Service.” That is, because they know how to be diplomatic and get the job done under hardship. Norman writes very much in the light of 9-11 and the demand for big homeland security systems in transportation and elsewhere. He has come up with a primer for taking that security system from first idea or squiggle on paper to commissioning, alive to the need for project management: “I sometimes ask contractor project managers what the completion date is for the project or some important phase of its construction. It is astonishing, but they rarely know. I assure you that any project manager who does not know the completion date will not meet it.” This book, then, is for the systems designer who finds the next step up daunting.
