Never Again
- By Ralph C. Jensen
- Dec 01, 2014
“Station 71, you’re responding to a multi-car,
motor vehicle accident.”
He silenced his pager and slipped
out the back door of the engineering firm where he
worked.
“71-A?”
“71-A en route,” he replied, knowing that he could
be putting his “real” job on the line.
It was 1993, and Dan Krantz’ strongest commitment
was to his local emergency medical service as
its commanding officer. A young civil engineer out
of Rutgers, he was pursuing a career in construction
management. Working as an EMT and firefighter was
the most rewarding work he had ever performed, and
remains so. Later married, and blessed with their first
child, Krantz began wondering if his dedication to
public safety was conflicting with his responsibility as
husband and father.
Today, Krantz is CEO of Real-Time Technology
Group (RTTG), a provider of identity management
technologies for secure operations and incident response.
Proud of its 100 percent U.S.-based operations,
the company serves state and local agencies and
private security directors nationwide. RTTG’s evolution
is about a small group of people who devote
themselves to solving national security challenges.
Painful Lessons
It was 1999, and the world was enamored with online
shopping. Krantz, however, envisioned a different purpose
for the Internet. He recognized the ability to unite
the efforts of disconnected organizations, proactively
monitor shared intelligence and automate communications
to accelerate business process in a strictly-controlled,
permission-based and audited environment.
Aligned with proven technology developers, Krantz
founded Real-Time Technology Group in September
1999, using the Internet’s infrastructure to support
more effective critical information sharing among independent,
otherwise disconnected, organizations.
After 9/11, safety and security professionals focused
on some painful lessons. Emergency managers
needed to improve the allocation of specialized
responders and resources in times of crisis. Security
directors hardened perimeters to better control access
to sensitive facilities and public landmarks constantly
busy with employees, contractors, vendors, volunteers
and visitors.
“Suddenly,” Krantz said, “I realized the value of
my background in process engineering and emergency
operations.”
Passionately Committed
The RTTG team gained valuable experience developing
and hosting complex, Web-based, process management
technology solutions that would be a critical
expertise in a Post-9/11 world. The team applied
everything they’d learned: developing contact, lead
and sales order management systems to what is now
known as identity management. By the Fall of 2003,
RTTG’s efforts and infrastructure were dedicated to
the development and hosted management of practical,
affordable Homeland Defense and Public Safety
technologies.
By then, safety and security professionals were
deeply committed to the ideal that failure couldn’t
be an option. RTTG’s crucial realization was that effective
solutions required cooperation by disparate
groups of people: intelligence agencies; state and local
law enforcement; emergency managers; training
academies; facility owners; contracting companies;
organized labor groups; and employment screening
and other third-party service providers. Krantz once
again involved with his true passion—public safety—
and instilled that same passion in everyone who
worked at RTTG.
“We all come to work knowing we contribute to
our nation’s safety and security,” he said. “Our office
features many reminders: 9/11 memoirs, the Flag of
Honor, a picture of the WTC Memorial Lights and a
treasured piece of steel from WTC given to us in appreciation
of our charitable efforts on behalf of The
Feal Good Foundation.”
Against All Odds
The World Trade Center site remains the world’s
highest-value terrorist target. After 9/11, the inside
threat posed by thousands of contracted workers at
Port Authority of NY and NJ facilities demanded a
much-improved vetting process. Thus began a fourand-
a-half year RFI/RFP process—one that drew the
nation’s largest, most resourceful defense contractors.
But Krantz, supported by his team who simply refused
to fail, had committed all of RTTG’s resources
to its new Real-Time Verification (RTV) technology,
knowing that RTV would be the perfect solution.
Despite intense competition, this small, unknown
team from Flemington, N.J. proved their value when
they presented the port authority with a working system
able to meet its evolving needs.
“We assembled a comprehensive package of technology
and services that was hard to beat,” Krantz
said. “Eventually, the team that Jim Campbell (late
principal of Ambassador Medical Services, Inc.) and
I brought together was awarded the project, and we
co-founded our first trusted community, the Secure
Worker Access Consortium (SWAC).”
Agents of Change
Awarded the SWAC contract was only the first of
many battles that RTTG and its partners would fight
in gaining the active participation of all groups within
the capital construction ecosystem.
“We naively had a build-it-and-they-will-come attitude,”
Krantz said. “Our business model was unique,
and required the port authority to simply promote the
program, not pay for it. We assumed each participating
group would embrace the program and pay our annual
membership fees in support of safety and security. We
neglected to sufficiently consider the impact of our proposed
solution on this diverse group of organizations
and nearly bankrupted the program from the start.”
User adoption is key. There was tremendous pressure
to demonstrate tangible value to the groups
involved, all of whom needed to embrace a new cooperative
effort that wasn’t administered by the port
authority, required them to provide personal information
and submit to background checks.
“We protect personally identifiable information
(PII) rather than distribute it via faxes and photocopies.
We’ve eliminated paper records, audit all access to
our system and provide contractors all the tools they
need to easily assure their compliance with security
requirements. As permitted, everyone has real-time
access to the same data.”
RTTG hit the road with its SWAC partners to engage
their customers, holding user meetings at all the
high-volume work sites to help them understand the
benefits of participation.
“We’re leveraging expertise gained in critical infrastructure
protection to benefit all kinds of facilities,”
Krantz said. “We’re helping first responders assure
the proper training and optimal allocation of specialized
resources. I couldn’t be more proud of my team.
It’s a privilege to work with them, and an honor to
direct our collective energy toward the ultimate goal
of ‘Never Again.’”
This article originally appeared in the December 2014 issue of Security Today.