The Makings of a Smart Building

There are 9,739 ways to make a building "smart." Wait... now there's 9,741 ways... Wait... 9,745 ways... Wait... well you get the idea. New #PropTech is popping up all the time, and there is no end in site. With so many buildings out there and more being built, the square footage is a persistent carrot for many an entrepreneur.

Unfortunately, I see time and time again new vendors come around with no clue how the industry works. They call it "disruptive" but what it truly is is out-of-touch. They've no interest in working with others, collaborating, or integrating. "Just use our widgets and our overpriced software, and you'll be saved from all your woes!" Then they disappear. Or worse, get absorbed into one of the big guys and slowly die on the branch shaded by the mass of established growth above them.

The opportunity is clear, but collaboration and integration must be at the beginning of your strategy. If you want to make a building smart, you need to have the right pieces. What I share here is far from exhaustive, but it is a checklist of minimum requirements to ensure you have the true makings of a smart building. To be exact (and far from exhaustive), there are 3 things... they each unintentionally start with P.

1) Play It Out First

Plan Big. Start Small. Scale Fast. This simple quip is pregnant with complexity. The first step is to plan big. I would implore you to also THINK big. Some would take this as a cliché sales strategy, but what I've found is that the most successful projects are the ones that have a final destination in mind. i.e. "This isn't just a simple energy sub-metering project. This is setting a baseline for a larger energy initiative I want to roll out to all my buildings in 3-5 years!" Ah, so now you know that you'll need partners or integrations to read that data and interpret it later!

What many sales folks try to do is sell you on the data interpretation NOW! But remember part two... Start Small. Budgets are NOT wide open, and for good reason. You need to have a strategy and then work that strategy as time and budget allows. The proverbial ocean boiling rarely goes well. And as we all know, there are entire companies who have built large balance sheets on ocean boiling solutions to the chagrin of decades of dissatisfied users.

Don't boil the ocean.

2) Polite Vendor Partners

One size does not fit all (see "ocean boilers" above). You have to partner with multiple vendors to get the exact solution you want. Your BAS likely does not have the fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) you want. Your energy monitoring solution likely does not have the ability to push schedules into your PoE lighting system. Your access controls likely do not have the ability to know when a maintenance person will be showing up based on the work order management system. Your IT department probably hates you.

Once you have a plan in place, then it's a matter of bringing the right partners together. There are new categories of OT SI's (operational technology system integrators) that are popping up and calling themselves Digital Orchestrators or IoT Orchestration Companies. These are brilliant! Their goal is to bring together vendors and solutions that may otherwise have never come together before, all for the purpose of driving the greatest amount of value for the end user. An HVAC MSI (master system integrator) would be subcontracted by these guys... unless we can continue to evolve as an industry (a topic for a different article!)

Vendor partners need to:

• Be willing to work with other vendors
• Be able to work with other vendors
• Be willing to accept a smaller role in the larger application

These are rather emotional words for some, but the IoT / Smart Building "pie" is huge. A slice is all each vendor needs, and you can still go on your golfing trips to Florida and your pheasant hunts in South Dakota... it's a big pie!

3) Pivotability

I'd like to introduce you to a man named Later Tim. Later Tim is always thankful for the work that Now Tim does. Later Tim knows a lot more than Now Tim does, too. Later Tim would likely tell Now Tim to do things different, but Later Tim is always glad that Now Tim at least did what he did before Later Tim got there.

Confused?

Your future self will likely be more informed and have hotter items to deal with. You cannot predict what the future will hold, so when you are creating and driving a smart building initiative, you need to ensure that the vendors and solutions and teams are all prepared and capable to pivot if needed. Some solutions are so narrow and niche that they have zero flexibility when a curveball is thrown. They can't adapt. A building rarely changes, but its uses, tenants, occupants, and environment can change overnight. Exhibit A: COVID.

But even in less dramatic or overblown ways, strategies and priorities do change. Businesses, schools, and organizations see that clearly now. Smart building products and systems have to allow for those changes and work in extended use case environments. So some questions to ask are:

1. Is this product flexible enough to be used across multiple use cases?
2. Is this integration partner nimble enough with a skilled bench to execute on multiple ROI streams?
3. Can the people I'm working with now handle the addition of two more vendors and solutions?

Make It Unless You Fake it

Making a building smart is both complex and possible. But you can do it! Don't settle for poorly thought through strategies. Take your time and make a plan. Pick vendors and solutions and partners that will truly have the end goal in mind and gladly work together to execute the master plan. When things don't work out exactly as you had planned, adjust and adapt, and if you picked the right vendors, they'll be right there alongside you. This will save money, effort, resources replacing partners, and drive you ever so closer (day by day) to your desired end result: a smart building where occupants are healthy and happy, the owner's money is being made and saved, and all vendors reap the rewards of successful projects and grateful customers!

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(My name is Tim Vogel. I work with an incredibly talented team on KMC Commander, an Open, Secure, and Scalable IoT Platform for Smart Buildings. We like collaboration. We like partnering. We like Thai food. And IT likes us! Let's talk about your smart building sometime.)