How we think

What the register is for.

Visitor management in the UAE has become a ritual borrowed from countries with a different problem. We have stood at gates in this country since 1993. This is what we see, and why the kit is built the way it is.

The ritual

A visitor arrives. A form is filled in, by hand or on a tablet: name, ID number, company, telephone, whom they are visiting. A lanyard is handed over. From that moment the lanyard is the check. A guard looks at the colour, and the colour says that somebody else, earlier, checked this person. That somebody was careful and never makes a mistake. Right?

Why the form is wrong more often than anyone admits

The name on the form was typed by a person reading a script that is not their own, or by a guard in the eighth hour of a shift in the heat, copying from a card held at arm's length. We have seen registers where the same visitor appears under three spellings and the telephone number belongs to nobody. Nobody did anything wrong. The form asked a human to do what humans do badly, and asked it a hundred times a day.

The procedure did not start here. It came from countries where the gate is expected to stop somebody. Here it hardly ever is. This is one of the safest countries there is, and on almost every day of the year the check has no consequence at all. A check without consequence becomes a habit, and a habit is done with the eyes half closed. That is not a failing of the guard. It is what any of us would do.

The fix that fails the other way

The industry's answer to a bad form is a better form. Register before you come, upload your ID, confirm by email. That moves the typing from a tired guard to the visitor. At a school it moves it to a parent who already pays the fees, and who is now asked to do homework to enter the building they pay for. The second parent says no, and the gate is back to a lanyard and a glance. Pre-registration is a reasonable idea meeting an unreasonable expectation.

The day the register is asked

A register is almost never asked to stop anyone. It is asked, later, to be right. An inspector asks for the visitor log of a Tuesday in March. A dispute asks who signed the contractor in. A school asks who collected a child, and the answer had better be a name, a photograph and a time, not the colour of a lanyard. On that day the register is worth exactly what went into it, and what went into it was typed.

Nothing typed, nothing asked

So we built the register the other way round. The name, the ID number and the photograph come from the chip of the card the visitor already carries, in two seconds, letter for letter as the state issued them. The guard's one job is to look from the chip's photograph to the face, which is the one check a human eye is good at, tired or not. The parent is asked for nothing. The record is sealed as it is written and exported as it was sealed.

The lanyard still says somebody checked. Now it is true.