Advice to buyers of biometrics
24/05/10
Karin Sveheim is director of Markets at Precise Biometrics. In this article, she gives her best advice to organizations that are about to enter the procurement phase.
Start by choosing the right technology
Biometrics is a broad concept that embraces many different technologies. Which technology and which supplier to chose depends entirely on how the technology is going to be used, and therefore the best advice I can give is that you should start with a thorough analysis of what you require. Start by answering these questions:
- Will the solution be used without the help of personnel or operators? Or will the solution be used under the supervision of, for example, passport police?
- Is control and security the primary reason for introducing a biometric solution, or is the objective to provide end-users with better service and convenience: for example, to simplify for users identifying themselves to networks and computers, protecting user integrity, or speeding up check-in and check-out.
- What does the national legislation look like? National legislation on data security, privacy and storage of personal data may affect your end-solution.
- Will the user actively use the biometric solution and is this for cooperative verification, where the user has something to gain, or for law enforcement solutions?
- Is it necessary to have several competing solutions to choose from, or should it be a unique technology solution?
When the organization has considered and answered these questions, it will be easier to determine which type of biometric solution is the right one. The integrity aspect will, for example, be very important if good customer service is an important motive, or if there is strict national legislation on the storage of personal data. In such a case, a solution where biometric data is stored and matched on a smart card carried by the user, instead of storage in a central database, is the alternative best suited to protect user-privacy. If the objective instead is to monitor and protect a departure hall without people playing an active role, or even being unaware of the control, then a database solution is necessary and perhaps face recognition could be a good alternative as biometric solution.
Is the supplier intuitive?
When a decision has been made concerning the technology, it is possible to start evaluating suppliers. My recommendation is to look carefully at the following:
- What references do the suppliers have?
- Which installations has the company carried out?
- For what type of customers?
- How large are the installations?
- How long is the supplier’s experience?
- Are the supplier’s solutions used in real live situations?
Fingerprint recognition for example is nowadays an accepted and well-proven technology in daily use by companies and governments all over the world. For this reason, you should as a buyer be able to demand that the supplier has relevant references to support the fact that their solution is proven and functions as it should in real life situations.
It pays off to carefully examine the supplier’s demonstration software and integration tools, which will give an idea of the resources the customer needs to assign, integrate and adapt to the technology in their system. Flexible and well-proven integration tools can save a lot of time and money when the technology is to be implemented. The supplier should also be able to offer rapid and reliable support.
Another important issue is to establish how flexible the solution is if you need to replace parts of the system in the future. As an example, some suppliers offer biometric solutions that only are compatible with the supplier’s own hardware. In this case, you tie yourself to one specific supplier for a long time. Being dependent on one supplier might become both expensive and problematic when parts in the system need to be replaced. In a card-based solution it is also important to not be tied to one card supplier, so that you can choose to complement or replace cards according to new budgets or requirements.
Quality is getting it right
One question I am often asked is how you as a customer can judge between different technologies and suppliers in terms of quality. It is usually a long answer, but quality is primarily about the solution being adapted to the customer’s specific needs. Because these needs differ, the measure of quality also depends on which customer is asking the question. A good supplier has the capacity to make far-reaching adjustments of their solution to customer requirements and their specific conditions, alternatively is the product so flexible or well packaged that the integrator or customer can make such adjustments on their own.
Generally speaking, both the hardware and software can maintain different degrees of quality, fingerprint readers can for example be intuitive to a greater or lesser degree, and the software can also communicate with the user to a greater or lesser degree through Graphical User Interface (GUI).
To get the right quality for the system you should focus on the enrolment. Enrolling users in a fingerprint-based system, the image taken of the fingerprints has to be of as high quality as possible. This applies regardless of which biometric system you choose. The better the user feedback is, and the more intuitive the reader or capture device, the better the image quality and the more flexible the enrolling process. At the same time, no investment can replace motivated operators or users, as well as an acceptance of the fact that the enrolment must hold a high quality.
Quality in terms of the security level is about getting the right balance between the tolerance level for errors and user-friendliness. This is measured in False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR). FAR is the risk that the system incorrectly accepts and lets through a person, and FRR is the risk that the system incorrectly does not accept a person. The optimal solution is to have a low FAR ratio, e.g. 1:50,000 without having an excessively high FRR, e.g. 2%. A good supplier should be able to contribute with advice and the technology to set it to the level that best suits the customer. To prevent the wrong people from accessing a sensitive installation you strive for the lowest possible FAR, and are prepared for the fact that sometimes users need to repeat the verification procedure. If the objective instead is to speed up the flow of customers who are members of a recreation centre, then user-friendliness will often be more important.
A final tip prior to procurement is to try to obtain the best possible overview of the project when comparing costs between different suppliers. It is a good thing if the calculations take into consideration down-time as a result of errors, costs for technical support, the time it takes to implement the system, and how flexible and future-proof the solution is and so on. Also take into account hidden costs, such as complex password management, that is very expensive but not always calculated or visible as a cost. The more carefully you have done your homework before making the decision to purchase, the more certain you will be of getting a flexible and cost-effective solution that really does the job.
Karin Sveheim is director of Markets at Precise Biometrics, a company that has participated in a vast number of international tenders of biometric solutions.
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