Measuring resilience: Harnessing the value of command and control centres

PwC Middle East’s Global Command and Control Centre (CCC) Index establishes the world’s first benchmark for CCC performance, helping to strengthen national safety, security and resilience during disruptions

Modern command and control centres play a critical role helping cities, infrastructure and organisations stay secure and resilient. In more volatile operating environments, when geopolitical conflicts can reshape airspace access, logistics and supply-chain routes in real time, these centres manage essential operations under growing pressure. But while they can monitor everything, some still struggle to take quick informed decisions.

From policing and emergency management to energy and transport, they enable real-time coordination across critical operations, bringing together data, monitoring and decision-making to help organisations manage disruption as it unfolds. Yet, research shows that despite heavy investment, most CCCs remain expensive monitoring environments, not true decision engines. 

To help address this gaps, PwC Middle East has developed the Global CCC Index, the world’s first structured framework for assessing and guiding command and control centre transformation. The Index enables CCCs to identify operational blind spots, benchmark themselves against global peers, and prioritise innovation across different stages of maturity – traditional, advanced and moonshot.

While traditional centres are reactive and siloed, advanced centres are stronger on real-time monitoring and coordination but still fall short on predictive and prescriptive capability. Moonshot centres are more integrated, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled and dynamic in how they support decision-making.

The broader aim of the index is to accelerate the journey towards the ‘moonshot’ readiness, where command environments become more proactive, data-driven and increasingly self-optimising.

PwC Middle East has assessed 20 global CCCs across the three maturity levels and across geographies and domains to understand their current maturity. Our analysis shows that while most centres excel at real-time visibility, fewer than 30% demonstrate strong decision orchestration or predictive capability.

This is where weaker models start to show their limits. Investment in monitoring may be increasing, but decision rights often remain unclear and escalation logic ambiguous. Situational awareness improves, but not the shared operating picture required to act across functions. In stable conditions, those weaknesses can remain manageable. During disruptions, they become far more costly.

The consequences show up quickly in practice:

• A transport operator may detect disruption early, but still struggle to reroute services because operations, customer communications and external coordination sit in different channels
• An energy or utilities provider may identify pressure in one part of the network, but lack a fast way to judge the knock-on effects on field teams, maintenance and service continuity
• A city authority may have the feeds, sensors and control rooms, but still lack the authority and playbooks needed to act decisively

Across different operational domains, CCCs are evolving in distinct but converging ways. In policing, they are becoming more intelligence-driven and better integrated across agencies. In smart cities, they are emerging as technology-first urban control hubs. For critical national infrastructure, they are enabling more resilient and cost-efficient security operations. In crisis management, centres are moving towards more automated and predictive response systems. And in maritime operations, CCCs are increasingly using AI and predictive analytics to optimise performance while also reducing emissions. What unites these shifts is a broader transition from reactive oversight to more anticipatory, data-driven command.

In the Middle East because organisations already have stronger command foundations in place, the opportunity now is to use those capabilities more effectively under pressure, narrowing the gap between what leaders can see, what they can decide and how quickly the organisation can act when conditions change.

The report highlights Flagship CCCs to watch in 2026 such as Rio’s Operations Centre, which coordinates multiple city departments through a unified platform, as well as the Singapore Police Operations Command Centre (POCC) and Antwerp Police Control Centre, which combine real-time visibility with stronger cross-agency coordination and clearly defined operating concepts.

To help CCCs realise their full ‘moonshot’ potential, organisational leaders need to remove bottlenecks across operations, governance, ecosystem coordination and technology.

Three priorities stand out:

• Diagnose: Benchmark maturity using the CCC Index
• Align: Clarify decision rights, data ownership, escalation paths
• Evolve: Invest in AI-led orchestration and predictive decisioning