9 paths to a successful control room

19/11/2025

Earlier this year, Barco published its second Global Control Room Report (Barco control room report 2025), based on research involving more than 2,000 control room professionals worldwide. It gives us a rare peek behind the scenes in the world of operators, supervisors, IT managers and C-level leaders.

The big takeaways:

  • The two toughest nuts to crack are workflow complexity and reactive decision-making.
  • Each sector faces its own unique challenges, from operator fatigue to inadequate information-sharing.
  • Control room professionals in highly efficient control rooms are up to 34% more productive.
  • Those high-performing control rooms also spend more time improving their process and less time watching and monitoring.
  • And they collaborate far more often, including remotely and with external partners.

Make the control room more efficient and the people instantly level up. It’s not exactly headline news… but did you see the numbers? They are loud and clear.

23% of control rooms qualify as “highly efficient”, showing a staggering 34% increase in productivity. This is because they invest not only in solid tech and tools, but also in smarter workflows and collaboration systems.

For completeness: just over half are “simply” efficient (scoring 7 or 8 out of 10), while roughly one in five control rooms scores 6/10 or lower, battling through every shift.

But where does a control room’s success truly lie? What separates the best from the rest?

1. Precision really matters

It’s not quantum mechanics: the more accurately an operator responds, the smoother everything runs. Nearly half of the supervisors (49%) say “taking the right action” is the number one success factor.

2. But speed is just as crucial

This is what the operators say: when alarms go off, timing is everything. It’s critical to be able to react quickly under pressure.


The best control rooms hit that sweet spot between speed and precision.

3. Is a complex workflow inevitable?

According to the study, control room workflows have only become more complex in recent years.

 

Consider:

  • An overload of information
  • Underperforming technology
  • The complexity of working with multiple systems

 

Part of that complexity will always sit with the team. Some workflows can be streamlined, but many still require highly specialised operators who can read the situation and act fast.
 

At the same time, it’s also on us as integrators and control room designers to reduce the burden where we can: finding technology that filters the noise, avoids system hiccups and helps make the whole ecosystem feel less like a maze.

4. From reactive to proactive decision-making

In a perfect world, control rooms would predict issues before they arise. In reality, many still feel stuck reacting to whatever comes their way.


Why?

  • Too much reliance on intuition or patchy information.
  • Ever-more complex content to sort through.
  • Limited access to real-time data.
  • The clearer and cleaner the information flow, the more decisive the team.

Plot twist: talent retention

Oddly enough, high-efficiency control rooms are more likely to see their talent wander off (39% vs 32%). Not because they’re unhappy, 91% are actually quite pleased. These rooms simply attract top performers, and top performers not only tend to attract other job offers, they are also very often eager to keep on growing.

Meanwhile, in less efficient control rooms, almost half of employees are eyeing the exit.

5. Cybersecurity and other concerns

Cybersecurity looms large, particularly in control rooms. And even more so in control rooms handling sensitive data that may be high-value targets for cyberattacks, such as Government or Military.

 

Other challenges vary by sector:

Corporate and Energy & Utilities are often drowning in data streams from sensors, cameras, audio, chat… Sometimes about the same incident, or not particularly relevant.

Manufacturing struggles with finding the time, budget and staff to keep investing in technological improvements.

Healthcare is eager to share knowledge for optimal patient care, but their fragmented systems often hold them back.

In Transportation, operator fatigue is the big issue: monitoring multiple cameras and managing increasing amounts of real-time data, with no room for delay or error.

6. Is there enough time left to optimise?

In a typical control room, the team divides its time between:

  • Monitoring: keeping a constant eagle eye on screens and systems
  • Analysing: assessing what the incoming data means
  • Responding: taking immediate action when necessary
  • Documenting: recording what happened and how it was handled
  • Optimising: fine-tuning processes to improve performance the next time

 

Typically who? Smaller control rooms (1–5 operators) are often somewhat monitoring-obsessed. Larger teams (11+ operators) want to focus on continuous optimisation. Military and transport sectors stay firmly focused on monitoring, while corporate control rooms excel at analysis, and healthcare teams spend most of their time responding and documenting.

 

In general, the top performers—the rock stars of control rooms—spend proportionally less time monitoring and more time optimising. The struggling control rooms tend to do everything except optimise.

7. Collaboration: how well do teams work together?

Inside the control room, teamwork is a given. Some link up with external teams, services or agencies.

Here, the highly efficient control rooms go big:

  • They collaborate twice as often (67% vs 30%).
  • They work more fluidly across different sites of the same organisation (68% vs 38%).
  • And they also find international teamwork far less daunting.

 

Remote work is technically quite easy these days, but operators choose wisely. A third (31%) say they want and are able to work remotely, which is far fewer than in 2022 (49%). Administrative tasks fly by faster from home (60%), and some strategic or operational work as well. But when a crisis hits, “You can’t solve that from your home office.”

37% worry remote work slows down effective decision-making.

8. The modern operator skill set

The traditional control room focused on monitoring and raising alarms. Today, the role is more strategic. Control rooms are becoming operational hubs with a broad overview of how an organisation functions. It goes well beyond ensuring everything runs safely and smoothly.

In the most successful control rooms, team skills match this evolution:

  • Critical thinking and problem-solving top the list
  • Technical proficiency with advanced systems is essential

Today, control rooms can touch building management, production monitoring, ICT, emergency services, and, not to be forgotten, operator well-being. Not bad for one room.


So maybe they could use a little help…

9. The role of AI

We tried to avoid the A-word for as long as possible, but there’s no way around it. AI is simply incontournable.

A solid 68% of professionals believe AI has a bright future in control rooms.

 

Its strengths?

  • Chewing through huge datasets
  • Spotting anomalies and risks early, and anticipating security threats (risk management)
  • Supporting documentation and reporting, and assisting in optimising processes

On top of that, more than half (52%) think AI can improve overall safety.


But AI can’t do it alone. Technological progress will always require human expertise.

Here comes the future

Barco’s research makes one thing clear: the control room of the future is less about watching screens, and more about unlocking insights.

  • Smarter filtering and automated analysis of the constant data streams means operators, supervisors, IT managers and C-level can focus on what truly matters.
  • With so much intelligence available, control rooms become a treasure trove for proactive decision-making.
  • As their work becomes more strategic, operators shift from purely executing tasks to also supervising a growing suite of intelligent systems.