Although the title of my August column seems like an oxymoron, the cloud enables us to “Work Together” while flexing our greatest resource, our people, a group of individuals that separately create pieces that fit the cloud puzzle. I recently found clarity in the cloud and have started talking funny but now have a clearer vision of our future, a collaborative mosaic of our industry “Working Together, Separately."

AutomatedBuildings.com is a great example: Jane and I working separately from the industry as publishers of a B2B magazine generating the content which is the result of our collaboratory of all the working-together folks to create something we hope is useful to the industry. Open standards group like Haystack, BACnet, are based on working together but are powered by separate individuals.

In this issue:

Event and conference going in 21st Century 

Our mission is to help people be aware of events in their industry, help them find the best events, and to maximize the benefits of going to them.  - Anto Budiardjo, CEO PointView, Inc.

Anto tells of his free web service that brings all events together for us.  He is working together separately.

I have included a quick review of a digital signage company that uses their working-together collaboratory to help sell their individual services.

Digital Signage: Working together, separately with the IoT

Pleased to provide a review of a digital signage company that works together, separately, with several organizations.  These are the models that we all are moving towards, showing our clients who we work with and our separate added values. Our building automation companies will be judged by our collaboratory of resources of all aspects of not only automating but IoT-ing our buildings.  As we move rapidly to the IoT and the convergence of everything we will need to find companies to work with and one of the drawing cards will be their known collaboratory of folks that they work with to provide their separate value-added services.

Take a look at the partners in their collaboratory.

In this interview they explain the why:

Why is Digital Signage Important to Building Automation? 

For the first time ever it's now affordable for the average business to utilise digital signage, digital wayfinding, and content automation software. - Gajendra Ratnavel, CEO, L Squared Digital Signage

The core of all powerful web services is providing the ability for us to work together for free or at a very low cost in the cloud, but this all happens with separate individuals building these services.

Our future is clear: We need to identify our collaboratory resources that will take us to the outer edges of the IoT of buildings, but we need to clearly convey how our individuals will add value, and why they must be part of your collaboratory.

Part 2: Smart Buildings and IoT Will Depend On Young Talent

My last columns have spoken of the importance and strength of building our collaboratory or collaboratories, keeping the cloud open, and a greater understanding that we are the only resources that we have as an industry.  We collectively need to grow our people younger and with more IoT type thinking.  My first attempt at this is this call:

Seeking Youth for the IOT Journey of our Industry

Please join me in my request for online input to help map out a process for gathering thoughts, suggestions, and action of how we can attract young minds to our industry. Our future depends on this. The industries with the best and easiest-to-use IoT solutions will win. Their people will provide these solutions. We need bright young minds that grew up with IoT to be our people so we can nurture and educate them about our industry resources so they can help morph us into today.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]We are all getting older, but not necessarily wiser, and our deep understanding of the IoT cloud consuming our industry is not our known strength.  Our deep understanding of an industry that creates our present definition of smart, intelligent, integrated, connected, green, and converged large automated buildings is our strength. Our industry has seen us grow, coming in from the weeds as an industry known by a few, to achieving social acceptance and understanding, to our latest position as a major player in the IoT because of our deep knowledge of how to automate things and our understanding of what is already connected.

Although we have moved from obscurity to high visibility, our industry is unknown to the youth that are the only feedstock to grow our industry.  For the survival of our industry we need to reach out and engage the bright minds who have grown up with the chaos created by technological innovation — “the IoT” — and share with them the wisdom and reason of our grey hairs and our lives and loves of planting, growing, and nurturing truly smart intelligent buildings.

We all need to engage in mentorship and we will be amazed at what we learn from these bright minds, oh you thought we would be the mentors….smile.

As always our online free August issue is a collection of great articles, columns, reviews, new products, interviews and of course the steady stream of news depicting our rapidly evolution and journey Working Together. Separately.

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