December 2015 |
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CoRE Tech’s Silicon Valley Message:
‘Just Do It.’
|
Therese Sullivan, Principal, |
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Smart
Building technology isn’t being adopted at the pace expected. Why
aren’t more property owners getting off the sidelines? Chicago Bulls
Basketball star Michael Jordan inspired a lot of sports watchers to
become sports Do-ers in the 1980s and 90s. And, of course, there was
the ‘Sneaks.’ Can tech-firm smart building All Stars be as motivating?
Are their methods and tools a fit for the rest of us?
A 1990’s Nike Air Jordan advertising campaign features Michael Jordan and Spike Lee. The point was that with these ‘kicks’ and some training anyone can fly like Michael Jordan. Today’s question: With the right tools and methods, can anyone smart-building like Microsoft’s Darrell Smith or the facility managers at Intel, Cisco, Google and other Silicon Valley tech campuses?
Last week Realcomm’s annual corporate real estate
conference, CoRE Tech, happened in Silicon Valley. There were half-day
tours of Stanford University, Cisco and Google campuses as well as of
the new football stadium in Santa Clara. (For a
photo collection of the day’s events, click here.) Intel hosted one
afternoon of the conference at their headquarters. The next day Intel,
Google, Microsoft and other IT companies were prominent on the stage.
All these large-scale property owners have rich stories about their
journey to the smart campus. But are they relatable role models when it
comes to deploying intelligent building tech? Companies full of data
scientists with lots of spare cash and enthusiastic C-Level cheering
sections have certain advantages. I’m using the Michael
Jordan/Nike metaphor here to say that, in spite of their
exceptional-ism, the tech companies brought a mix of inspiration and
tool showcasing that may be just what the market needs to break the
inertia. When it comes to taking steps toward more comfortable,
energy-saving buildings through digital controls, it is time to
‘Just Do It.’
The buildings industries have been addressed by Silicon Valley’s big
tech companies and VC-funded start-ups before. Over the last decade
there have been forays into building automation and dramatic retreats
out. During the Q&A that concluded Intel’s afternoon of IoT-focused
presentations and campus story-telling, one of the first audience
speakers asked “Compared to a decade ago when Cisco first tried this,
what has changed?” Intel’s Eric Free, VP & GM of Smart Homes
and Buildings responded, “This time we’ve focused on interoperability
[with legacy systems]. Intel is creating revenue opportunities for some
of the traditional players.” One of the highlighted examples of how
Intel is partnering, rather than threatening head-to-head competition,
is the KMC Commander Internet of Things Platform for Building
Automation. A new Intel Smart Building partnership with roots in Taiwan involves Tatung and Elite Computer
Systems.
Another questioner asked “How far up the stack does Intel want to go?
What portion of the IoT spectrum does Intel want to enter?” To this
Intel’s Free answered “Intel is good at building building blocks. We helped to define the Industrial Internet
Consortium’s reference architecture. Then we added building
block technology—chip level, gateway level, middleware, security and
manageability.”
The Intel exec’s were also asked about how Intel was competing,
cooperating and comparing itself to other big IIT Consortium members
like GE, Cisco, IBM. The point made was that, with interoperability,
there can be real competition at each level of the IoT, ultimately
driving the costs of IoT building blocks down. Coming back to my
metaphor, it is this cost competition that is making these stacks akin
to the Air Jordan sneaks—not outside the budgetary reach of motivated
building owners and facility managers. Of course, in addition to the
off-the-shelf costs of an IoT platform, there are costs associated with
the custom work of preparing all the building data for analysis. So,
it’s noteworthy that Intel partners like KMC are members of Project
Haystack, the open-source movement to define a semantic dictionary and
common data tagging methods for buildings. Haystack adoption will make
it much easier and cost-effective to bring data streams from disparate
building equipment systems into an IoT platform. Up until now, the data prep job on a smart building integration
project can represent from 50% to 70% of the total cost.
Exploring cost/benefits, Panel Moderator Paul Oswald of ESI/CBRE, asked
his team of celebrity FMs, Daniel Cocosa of Google and Darrell Smith of
Microsoft, “Is the juice, worth the squeeze?” “These systems
absolutely keep costs down,” explained Smith. “You don’t want to risk
employee productivity,” added Cocosa. Since
the story of his intelligent make-over of the Microsoft campus in
Redmond broke over two years ago, Darrell Smith and his team
haven’t stopped bringing more data points and whole buildings under the
control of their analytics engine. In describing where Microsoft is
today, Smith said “We’ve moved from reactive to proactive, and we’re
aiming to become predictive.” One aspect of common ground between
his situation and the average corporate facilities manager’s is that he
isn’t dealing with new construction. “I haven’t built anything new for
a long while, but, we’ve been able to accommodate growth in the space
we have by being more efficient.”
Even at Google and Microsoft, the panelists faced skepticism and
risk-aversion on the part of local financial decision-makers and
facility teams as they pushed the roll-out of their data-driven
operations and maintenance programs to new properties. Cocasa and Smith
concurred that to work with these headwinds, you pilot, prove and then
plow the savings achieved back into the program. You start with
lighting, you move on to a digital control upgrade, and you move up to
ongoing commissioning. The same order and logic of the steps is promoted by
the DOE’s Better Buildings program. Not understanding the rules of
engagement is not what is keeping all the spectators from lacing up a
pair of Air Darrells and getting on the court.
The
concepts of rolling out Energy Conservation Measures
(ECMs) and rolling back in the savings to create a virtuous cycle were
expressed well in this set of slides from the University of Virginia
shared by the US DOE’s Better Building program in October.
So here is where my basketball-shoe metaphor falls apart. Designing and
deploying a data platform for a facilities team to run an energy
efficient building efficiently is not trivial. This CoRE Tech
panel put the emphasis on the difficulty of change management, that is,
effective communication with all the stakeholders up and down the
design, construction, operations and maintenance chain – corporate real
estate groups, facility management teams, IT departments, engineering
firms, automation contractors, big equipment makers, sustainability,
energy management professionals, etc. And don’t forget occupants! You
need to keep all their roles and responsibilities in mind and get each
the right messages at the right time. Even at technologically-savvy
Google the challenge is daunting. Cocosa said, “There is a lack of
skilled people. You spend 3 to 6 months training. So we outsource.”
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If everyone is outsourcing smart building systems integration and
change management to existing smart building super-stars — outsource
companies like Paul Oswald’s team at CBRE/ESI and members of the
Connexx Energy network — and these companies are too busy to
communicate about what they are doing, how is the number of people with
the needed skills going to grow? At the CoRE Tech expo,
cutting-edge Building IoT technology was on display from sponsoring
companies like Lutron, Lynxspring, Controlco, Switch Automation,
Ecorithm, Lucid and others. But, how many CoRE Tech attendees had the
knowledge and experience to differentiate among them?
Every day, I note evidence that bench-warmers know they need to make a
move. Building Robotics tweeted from its session at USGBC Greenbuild DC
on November 20th that attendees voted Building Automation, Control and
IT as the biggest factor impacting the future of the built
environment. But, to site one metric, how many USGBC members read
automatedbuildings.com? Those readership statistics don’t yet
reflect this burst of interest. Real scale in Smart Buildings may not
happen until more than just a few people are able to do the controls
running and jumping. Until then, everyone who is starting a project
better have one of the existing super-stars on the team.
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