Thomas Friedman’s new book “Thank you for being Late” does a great job of explaining that humans live in a linear world, but our technology is developing exponentially.

One effort that can solve some of the issues here is using data standards (open or at least de facto agreement) as bridges to and from all the emerging applications that need to share in order to accomplish a unified solution.

Take a corporate command center for example. A large company may have facilities all over the world (The sun never sets on …..), requiring 24×7 situational awareness and threat monitoring. Having to log into 12 different siloed systems is not a good long term answer; impacting training, response, quality of information and many other elements.

Using standards as simple as RSS and as capable as Common Alerting Protocol (CAP – OASIS), organizations can blend information together into a much more unified view for both analysts and corporate execs. Adding a geospatial component can also enhance visibility and context.

This is important now, but will become increasingly important as organizations deploy billions of sensors that can faithfully send alerts when a control threshold has been crossed. Eventually, a motion sensor being tripped will cause an image recognition equipped camera to start recording exception video, enable license plate recognition if vehicles are involved, collect cell phone signals and other information from the area of the likely breach, and much more. Driving all this incredibly useful information in silos will diminish its value as a proactive tool. It might all be there after the fact so that you can reconstruct your worst day ever; but taking a proactive approach to situational awareness by blending all your data might help minimize and mitigate your problem.

My 2010 book, “Silver Bullets: how interoperable data will revolutionize information sharing” is free (digital) for the asking.