I’m traveling this week — Indianapolis, DC, and Atlanta. I’m at the Indy airport, which is brand new and beautiful, by the way, awaiting my flight to DC. Last night I drove into the city and fought my way through rush hour traffic (yeah, about 5 minutes of it on the freeway, I’m not in LA anymore).
The city is under construction — all the downtown street are being upgraded in preparation for the Superbowl to be held here next February. They only have about three months to go and I think they will be finished — most of the work seems to be cosmetic. Denison Parking prez Mark Pratt tells me that one of the reasons that the mayor was reelected was his attention to all the pre Superbowl public works projects.
This week here in Indy T2 is hosting its annual user’s conference. Marketing guru Irena Goloschoken tells me that more than 288 folks from their customers are in attendance. CEO Mike Simmons and his crew really do it up right with sit down dinners, presentations, a small trade show (mostly T2 vendors) and many presentations on the company’s products and training sessions to give users a better grasp of the myriad of applications T2 has for cities, universities, and hospitals.
The theme is football, piggybacking on the Superbowl meme. I have been invited to a number of T2 events, and the company knows how to put on a session that gives its customers an intensive three day program of information and training. When they go back to their organizations, these folks will know how to better use their T2 products to their benefit.
I also took a tour of Denison’s ‘command center’ where Mark showed me an elegant control center that is currently monitoring four garages and has another dozen in the queue ready to go on line. According to Mark the program of running garages from a central location with few if any staff on site not only increases financial security, but with their twist, gives good service, too.
Unique, I believe, to Denison, is when parker contacts the central command center with a problem, the staff can not only see the parker and talk to them, the parker can see the staff member. Mark believes that being able to see the person talking to you gives credibility and good service feelings to the parking experience. Seems like a good program to me.
The use of central command centers is the way of the future. Keep your eye on it.
Oh, Denison’s command center is located in a former bank’s basement, behind 12 inch vault doors. Its also where the Denison crew runs its on street meter enforcement and coin counting program, under contract to ACS, for the public/private partnership here in Indy.
I’ll report back after I get to the nation’s capital.
JVH
