An Operations Center, or simply an “OC,” is the capability developed by an organization to support operations occurring at remote sites. They are popular in the energy, mining, and construction industries to provide guidance, specialist knowledge, and cross-functional assistance to the “sharp end” of the business where space is at a premium due to geography or the desire to keep staff out of harm’s way.

A mission control center at NASA is an example of an OC; it is the location where all the system specialists are co-located with the data and communications systems to support the activity occurring in orbit. Many other industries have similar arrangements to channel collaboration with the aim of eliminating silos of expertise and improving operational efficiency alongside the center’s more clearly stated goals.

Focus 1: An operation center is not a room

Companies usually focus on “the OC,” a showcase room full of big screens, cool architecture, and eager, young engineers. This is a red herring; the room itself is rarely that important and often not needed. Some OCs can be completely virtualized, negating the need for a room at all. When the focus is a room, you can be sure it just becomes another silo in your business; a giant, shiny, expensive silo!

Focus 3: Keep it simple

OC projects tend to overstep their boundaries and risk becoming overblown with complexity and cost. Kicking off an OC initiative means that someone high up in the organization is generally willing to spend money on a somewhat ambiguous scope full of hope and promise.

It is pretty astonishing how many initiatives and parallel projects suddenly appear out of the woodwork and try to hitch their wagons to the OC. Some of these may well be highly relevant, but most are not. You will also be amazed at how many new technologies the IT department has wanted to unleash on the workforce, dashboards, data warehouses, and new visualization tools. If they are strong candidates for improvement, they should be separate projects. Your AV provider has a giant book of amazing new collaborative technologies they think you should design into the space to help improve things; you can maybe afford to take on one or two of the more compelling ones but don’t buy into the hype.

The OC will introduce enough change for most staff to cope with, and they will become very resistant to new ways of doing things they can do already. The prime focus of an OC rollout should be around getting people to evolve new ways of working, break down the silos and be reactive to the needs of the remote sites. Fancy new ideas and “amazing” technology distract from this, overloads people, and can create further information divides. All these are barriers rather than improvements.

Focus on making better use of the tools you already have. Utilizing the full capabilities of your existing technology is often overlooked. Your current applications will have evolved and improved since you started using them; programs like MS Teams can suit an OC very well if properly adopted. This way, you bring in new capabilities with little added complexity as your teams will be familiar with them already. Avoid bringing in new dashboards, portals, and such until your OC’s new ways of working have bedded down. These tools require active management to stay relevant and tend to proliferate out of control if you are not careful; soon, you will need a dashboard for your dashboards and then a dashboard for your dashboard dashboards.

Adapting work within an OC rarely needs new technology; however, there are some use cases where it would be required. These tend not to be fancy or complex:

• Gaps in instrumentation or data; an OC relies on a flow of good data. Any gaps or problems will prove problematic and require resolution. This may be missing or poor instrumentation or simply badly structured data. This includes human-generated data – such as action logs and manual readings. Avoid “fixing” data that is already fit for purpose; those types of projects can take years!
• Improve existing collaboration tools; better quality VC and the possibility of some “always on” cameras to provide virtual co-location. Avoid new tools with a learning curve; consider introducing things like Smartboards later if you feel they will add value.
• Consider introducing technology to support the use of existing tools if they don’t contribute additional complexity. Epsis Enify is a useful application in this space as it can guide users to use the preferred applications and data sets in the context of the work they are undertaking. It also can be used to drive users to use the less explored aspects of the existing tools.

An OC should be used to introduce innovative ideas and technologies into the company, but do them later. Maintain awareness of change saturation by listening to the feedback of your user community and advancing when they are reasonably comfortable with the current state. Everyone is resistant to change, so a bit of discomfort is fine, but introduce change gently over time rather than inflict it all at once.

Yes, an OC also needs active ongoing management and technical business support. These are two new roles you will need to create.

Focus 5: No black mirrors

A screen, when off, looks like a black mirror and serves no purpose. If you are paying for the screen and the power to run it, then it needs to serve a purpose for anyone who may be nearby, even if just passing.

Generally, screens have an active use defined for them to justify their purchase; for my computer, information support for meetings, VC screens, and information displays to maintain situational awareness of machinery status or production rate. When a screen is not being used actively, it should be utilized as a passive information source to spread situational awareness information across the workforce. They can be used to show the machinery status to a broader audience, show plans, action trackers, operations logs, priorities for the day, weather data, OC success information, general trends, news, and relevant social information.

Shared situational awareness is something that OCs are built to provide. It is far more efficient for people to see a problem manifesting as they grab a coffee rather than finding out when someone remembers to tell them. They may not have to take any immediate action, but being aware of potential issues coming down the line is invaluable. It also helps pull together a sense of community and joint responsibility, helping break down silos of work. No information within an OC should be privileged or “hidden” as everyone in the IOC is there to collaborate.

This not only includes the large screens rolled out across the environment but every personal screen across the center. Is a tumbling company logo of value? Nope, but some of the information you look at daily popping up as a screensaver should be useful to your colleagues when passing by and yourself when you are reading a paper document at your desk.

Although an OC should be a relatively open space for company employees to pass through, you should remain cognizant of the fact it is a dynamic working environment, and some of the information on the screens could be valuable to competitors. A single snapshot of information without context as a visitor passes through the center is unlikely to be a problem, but screens should not be continuously viewable by anyone who has not signed your company’s NDA and security/privacy policy. Maintain awareness of confidential information and possible information bleed but avoid becoming paranoid about it.

One final note on screens; don’t buy into expensive blended screens or massive video walls; they are just not necessary these days and are rarely worth the money. 4K screens up to 80″ are cheap, ubiquitous, and can have tiny bezels, all the things you could only get on “high-end hardware” only a few years ago. There are many better things to spend your money on than unnecessarily expensive displays.

That is not to say all screens are equal; depending on your use case, you may need to buy professional grade displays for color accuracy or to provide 24/7 operation. You may have a genuine use-case for a giant video wall, or you may just wish to have a facility that looks very slick and high-end; these are all good reasons but do not let your AV provider sucker you into purchasing anything more than you want or need.

Indeed, much of the time, you can probably get away with consumer-grade screens if your center is only operating 8-hour days as it is cheaper to go to Costco and throw up a new screen when something breaks than to get anything more robust.

We urge you to follow the “Keep it simple” mantra for what sits behind the screens and drives them as well. A workstation PC with Windows can drive dozens of screens with relative ease without the need for scalers, matrix switchers, and other esoteric and inflexible video hardware. It is also simpler to manage and fix without resorting to AV specialists. Everyone knows how a PC works, and you can manage the screen real estate using simple software rather than expensive hardware that will leave you with another learning curve to conquer. We have seen many facilities where the advanced features of these screens remain unused as no one wants to engage with a weird touch panel on the wall to do anything but turn it on and off. Again, a tool like Epsis Enify can help manage screen content; particularly useful if you need to quickly throw up dozens of familiar applications across multiple displays with a single mouse click.

Focus 7: Build in flexibility

As you will have gathered from everything you have read above, flexibility in all things is a priority. Everything will evolve over time as you get to grips with the OCs’ developing capability and how it can best help with changing business demands. The work done in the center, how it is done, and the people in the center will change. Embrace the chaos!

Deal with the ambiguity and avoid overdesigning the facility by keeping it simple and modular.

Humans are simple creatures, and we tend to perform best in teams of just 3-5 people. Within an OC where you are mixing disciplines, this is quite a practical number too. Maintenance needs someone who knows the machines, someone who manages the spares, and someone to get the spares and people together. Optimization activities may require 2-5 engineers doing similar tasks across different elements of the facility, taking into consideration each other’s constraints. You can probably build small collaborative clusters of “useful functionality” across your more important use cases. Each cluster will collaborate as a team together with shared information on large screens in front of them and VC with the remote facilities they are supporting, providing a dual use of the screens.

This is fortunate as large screens tend to be viewable by people only a few meters away. By the time you pull together sight lines and viewing distances, the practical limit is 2-4 people clustered around a pair of large screens.

Our experience has shown that however you slice and dice your needs, you will always tend to fall back to a similar arrangement. We call these pods or modules. If you have a need for 5 or 6 people to collaborate periodically actively, then place the two modules beside one another.

Working with a series of identical 3-4 person modules removes complexity from the solution design as you create standalone modules with their own screens and desks and replicate them across the available floor space. There will be a natural connection between work occurring on each module that will guide which module to place next to which. For example, production sits next to optimization, sits next to maintenance, sits next to planning, and sits next to logistics.

They don’t need to be fully populated on day one, as this provides additional flexibility to shuffle people around as needed. As each module is independent of the others, the content of the giant screens in front of it will be driven by the people who sit around it. And they can move that to a new module as needed taking their content with them. Something that Epsis Enify can help streamline.

That pretty well deals with the people that work full time in the OC, but there are other use cases of the facility where you do need to pull groups together in a more transitory manner. Having a few meeting rooms for larger groups to gather with some privacy makes sense. Having a single large area in the middle of the facility is often a practical consideration for multi-site, multi-functional meetings to take place for large-scale planning or information sharing sessions. This is not used all the time so keep it open to reduce its footprint, promote deliberate information bleed to the modules around it, and allow its large screens to be used for passive situational awareness by everyone in the center.

Finally – ensure it is a pleasant place to work; these people are already dealing with constant noise and distraction, so they need places to relax, unwind and gather their thoughts. You will find gaps in your floorplan where you can place some soft furnished areas, refreshment facilities, huddle areas, focus rooms, and “show off” features.

Is that it?

Yes, pretty much! You don’t need a “big-bang” project that takes over half your building. The flexible requirement means you can approach building OCs gradually, incrementally, and cost-effectively. The main requirements are a few screens, the right people and a willingness to change your ways of working.

The two mistakes we see companies make most often when designing an OC are:

1. Building it as a tech showcase and not thinking enough about the work going on within it. We call this the “Build it, and they will come!” approach. They don’t come! People who work in these facilities don’t take full advantage of the cool tech and pretty well continue to work in the same way as they did before. This focus on the physical facility and not the collaboration is putting the cart before the horse. You are trying to create “One Team,” not “One Room,” and anything that does not directly contribute to this aim is of little value.
2. The facilities are designed for “a purpose.” By the time it is built and occupied, that purpose has evolved, and the needs have changed. The facility kind of works as intended but never truly delivers on its promise of improving the company in any significant way as they lack the flexibility to adapt.

The reality is that you are designing for ambiguity, evolution, and for emergent collaboration. Embrace this and lean into these as requirements and deploy your OC with simple practicality and ongoing flexibility to continually reinforce a shared worldview of your operations.

We hope this high-speed journey through some of our design principles was helpful and makes sense. If you have any further questions or want to dive into the details of any of this content, get in touch.