It’s a Sunday close to press time and I’m watching one of my favorite television shows, CBS Sunday Morning. One of the segments catches my attention; it’s about the job market seemingly coming to a stall, with first-time unemployment claims having exceeded 400,000 for 11 consecutive weeks (as of late June). A CBS Sunday Morning journalist interviews economist Lakshman Achuthan of the Economic Cycle Research Institute about why this is happening.

How to stay at the top of your game? Stay attuned to change, specifically to game changer technology platforms, including the ones discussed in this article, that are poised to take security from ‘what it is’ to ‘what it will be.’ Almost everyone has heard a version of Isaac Asimov’s famous quote, “The only constant is change,” which is a translated version of a quote by Heraclitus, a 500 B.C. Greek philosopher. 

A new resource is SDM’s BirdDog Career Center, to help you find  your next visionary. Planning for this month’s cover story about game changers got me thinking about what a game changer means to me and how I’ve experienced them both personally and professionally. In my adult life, having children and becoming a mother was the most obvious game changer… all previous priorities seem trivial compared to being responsible for a young person’s life.

Diebold Inc. earned the coveted Central Station of the Year Award in CSAA’s Excellence Awards competition, it was announced yesterday during the awards presentation held at ESX in Charlotte, N.C. Diebold operates monitoring centers located in Uniontown, Ohio and Honolulu, Hawaii.

Turning the corner on the 2010 economy was like telling off a friend who had it coming — you got to offload some of the poison, and you could move forward with a lesser burden. While the performance of the security industry in 2010 was less than stellar, there were some generally positive economic indicators in the first two quarters of 2011 that hold promise.

The once crisp line between the black and white of security dealer and systems integrator is definitely more blurry, and the question begs to be asked — Is there even a line anymore?

There are fewer than 3,000 dealer-owned central stations in the industry, but there are tens of thousands of security dealers operating without a central station who offer monitoring through the use of third-party central stations. 

Did anyone know that the folks at systems integrator Convergint Technologies wrote their own lyrics and choreographed a dance routine to Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation”?