How to build your own Control Tower

The last decade has seen an increasing understanding by forward-thinking executive teams on the business value of operational "Control Towers", and this has been exponentially accelerated by the unprecedented challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether you prefer the term, “Control Tower”, “Mission Control”, or “Command Center”, they more or less all refer to a set of capabilities, delivered by people, processes, and technologies to develop and/or deliver an operational strategy. In this article, I will provide an overview of the 4-panel display control tower prototype that I built, along with several considerations to keep in mind should you decide to create your own.

Background

For me the development of my executive control tower prototype was highly personal, as the idea came to me just as I joined Microsoft in March of 2020, the same month that COVID-19 lock downs began in the US. I’m certain that all of us can recall the uncertainty we felt in those days as each of us began to experience the sudden disappearance of canned goods, pasta, and hygiene & paper products from retail shelves in early 2020. Remember the crazy-long lines appearing at Big Box stores and people stock-piling toilet paper in their basements? These were just the early indicators of the great consumer goods and retail wake-up call that was to come regarding the just-in-time global supply chain upon which we had all come to depend being stretched beyond its limits.

Remember those first few weeks when COVID-19 cases began to spike in your area? When you and your colleagues began to realize this “remote work thing” may be happening for quite some time? Nearly all of us lucky enough to work from home through the global pandemic still had to quickly figure out how to set up a productive home office designed for remote work, which of course put further and sudden demand into the already stressed Global Supply Chain due to the acute need for home office furniture, and computer accessories, including the doubling of computer monitor sales in just the first two weeks of March.

In fact, Microsoft saw unprecedented and exponential growth in the use of the Microsoft Teams in those early weeks and months of the pandemic, including a 1000% increase in video calls in March of 2020. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, declared “we have experienced two years of digital transformation in two months.”

Before that tense month of March of 2020 was over, many countries and US States had initiated stay-at-home orders, creating monumental challenges for leaders of organizations everywhere. CEO’s and their leadership teams, suddenly thrust into remote working environments, were quickly suspecting that business as they had always known it was about to be transformed forever.

So, there I was, a brand-new employee with Microsoft, working from home in the midst of all of this disruption and uncertainty, and I started thinking about how we could flip the dilemma on its head. In the years preceding the pandemic, many companies – including my former employer – had begun implementing physical “control towers” (a.k.a., “command centers”) to better monitor business conditions ranging across Social Media Sentiment, Manufacturing Effectiveness, Supply Chain Distribution, and even IT Network Operations.

How might an executive control tower in your home office change the way you work and interact with your team? I decided to find out, with the goal of creating an executive control tower prototype at a reasonable cost. Here's what I discovered ...

Key Factors to Consider when Developing a physical Control Tower

Monitors – If you want to create a seamless appearance across your grid of monitors, you’ll want to find “frameless” or “thin bezel” monitors to minimize the space between active screen pixels. Monitors come in different display resolutions and refresh rates, which impact the quality of viewing experience for games or video. If you are affixing your monitor grid to a wall, you’ll need to consider other aspects of monitor design, such as the location of the power and input channel buttons, as well as the different input cables the monitor will take. For example, if your monitors are HDMI-only, then you’ll need a separate HDMI cable coming from your graphics card for each monitor. Some Display Port and USB-C compatible monitors will support “Daisy Chaining”, which is nice, because you’ll only need one output cable from your graphics card. Lastly, you may want your control tower panels to respond to hand gestures (i.e., pinch-to-zoom), and for this you’ll need touchscreen monitors, which are much more expensive than traditional displays. If you’re thinking about going down the touchscreen route for your control tower, I’d highly recommend considering a Surface Hub 2s (or newer), which provides you with an all-in-one solution, saving you from having to buy everything else. More on the Surface Hub later.

Graphics Card – The same way your computer has a CPU (Central Processing Unit) to run its operating system and applications, it also has a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) dedicated to … well, you guessed it … processing graphics. The GPU in your current computer probably is powerful enough to power 2-3 additional monitors, but if you want a 4x4 (or larger) monitor grid you’ll need a dedicated graphics card. In similarity to the many aspects you need to consider when buying your monitors, there are several attributes to your GPU that are important to research, including the number of and types of video input connectors, memory size, clock rate, etc. One other important consideration when selecting a graphics card is price and availability, as the global chip shortage has made some popular graphics cards nearly impossible to find, and prices have soared as a result during the pandemic – although this may soon be changing. Here’s a list of recommended graphics cards to check out.

GPU Enclosure (a.k.a., “External GPU” or “eGPU”) – Graphics Cards require a lot of power and cooling, and as such are designed for installation on a well-ventilated motherboard slot within a typical PC tower enclosure. If you use a laptop as your main computer (as opposed to a desktop PC), then you’ll need a dedicated GPU Enclosure for your graphics card to provide it with power and cooling. Like your GPU, you’ll need to research OS compatibility for these, especially if you plan to use a Mac.

Connection Cables and Adapters – Remember, you’re setting up a dedicated control tower here, so you’re going to need video and power cables for each monitor. You may even need display adapter cables, (e.g., Display Port to HDMI), as well as a special Thunderbolt 3 Type-C cable that connects the eGPU to your laptop. This is not your run-of-the-mill USB-C cable, so be sure to get the right kind. One other important FYI … you should only use Thunderbolt 3 cables that are two-meters (6-feet) in length or shorter to reliably achieve their expected 40Gbps data transfer rate.

Monitor Stands / Mounts – Oh yeah! How are you going to mount all these displays? Are you going to mount them to a wall, a desk, or would you like a portable solution?

I know, it’s enough to make your head spin … let’s cut to the chase!

My Control Tower Bill of Materials

Now that we have a better idea of the main factors to consider, here’s the actual Bill of Materials for the Control Tower that I built:

Monitors – (4x) ASUS VA27EHE 27” Eye Care Monitor Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS 75Hz Adaptive-Sync HDMI D-Sub Frameless – These displays are HDMI only and do not have Display Port inputs, but they look great, have a very thin bezel on three sides, and they were very economical for a 27” display.

Graphics Card – Radeon RX Vega 56 – Unless you’re an extreme gamer looking for 4K monitor performance, this graphics card with 56 GPU cores and 8MB of RAM is more than enough to power a 4-monitor control tower … if you can find one. I’m seeing used versions of this card selling on eBay lately for nearly double the $399 USD MSRP. Here’s a review to check out.

GPU – Razer Core X – Black External Graphics Enclosure for Thunderbolt? 3 Laptops – The Razer Core X provides plenty of power (650W) and cooling for nearly any graphics card you can throw at it. It’s also both Windows and MacOS compatible, hot swappable, and even provides 100W of power back to your laptop via the Thunderbolt 3 connection port, freeing up the need to have a separate power cable for your laptop.

Thunderbolt 3 Cable – CalDigit Thunderbolt 3 Type-C Cable - Active 40Gbps / 100W Charging / 5A / 20V (2.0 Meter Cable). – To help you get past the sticker shock of paying more than $60 for a 6-foot cable, just know that this is an essential part of your control tower setup to connect your laptop to an eGPU.

Monitor Stand – In an effort to make my control tower as "portable" as possible, I attached the monitors directly to a sheet of plywood, which is mounted to a Universal TV Stand. If I were to do this project again, I’d probably go with a “quad monitor stand” like this or something similar: VIVO Quad 13 to 30 inch LCD Monitor Desk Mount, Fully Adjustable Stand with Tilt and Swivel, Holds 4 Screens with Max VESA 100x100

All of this equipment together cost about $1700 USD when I bought it in March of 2020, and it has performed flawlessly for over two years with both my Windows and Mac laptops through major OS upgrades from Windows 10 to 11, as well as from MacOS upgrades from Catalina (v10.15), to Big Sur (v11), to Monterrey (v12). To help put the $1700 investment into perspective, an iPhone 13 ProMax with 1TB of storage is $1599, and a new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Laptop retails at over $2000. It's also very likely that you have home entertainment equipment that costs many times more ... why then settle for trying to run a multi-billion-dollar business through a single laptop screen?

Epilogue

I hope that you've found this article informative. Obviously, there is a lot more to building your own personal control tower than simply creating a physical space. You need to get very intentional regarding the data (or lack thereof) underpinning your operations, and resist the temptation to “boil the data ocean” … you can often drive improved business results with smaller data sets than you may think. You need to become conversant in data and analytics and learn what kinds of new questions you could be asking that will improve business results. There are also many off-the-shelf, software-based solutions to consider for your control tower, such as Microsoft’s Supply Chain Insights, Blue Yonder’s “Luminate”, and CH Robinson’s Navisphere Vision. Know that your people are watching you closely and that it's up to you to lead a data-driven culture.?

Having a physical control tower in either your workplace or home office will not be the “silver bullet” solution to your digital transformation, but it is a relatively low-cost investment that can transform how you look at your business forever.