Managing the Impulse for Control

Monday’s Wall Street Journal included an article on how technology has reduced the impulse control of top executives. Empowered by cell phones and Blackberries, they can no long control the impulse to reach out and touch their staff. The electronic tether means these executives are always on, unable to go on vacation, to really take time off. This poses two classes of risk. The executive experiences a loss of recovery time and narrowing of interests that hurts his long-effective. The more insidious problem is that his staff and top managers are unable to take responsibility for their jobs. Constant micromanagement enervates most staff and alienates the best. The interference and implied lack of trust was cited as a significant cause of turnover among the hardest to replace staff.

The same issue included an editorial by Dick Armey on the FAA and Air Traffic Control. He recommends closing down large portions of the current system and moving to one based upon a pervasive GPS. He described this process as moving from Flight Control to Air Traffic Management. A significant barrier to progress is the desire of Congress to preserve control and patronage in each and every district. The delays caused by the inability of the current Air Traffic Control to handle the current volume of flights are a significant cause of the frustrations of flying this summer.

In oBIX, if we do our work right, we will significantly reduce the span of control in today’s over-integrated systems. Individual systems and their control systems will be isolated with their own interfaces. To the extent the interfaces become service oriented, they will eliminate central system micromanagement of control, to be replaced with coordination of services. As in business, this will allow the systems with better service agents to flourish. A significant difference is that in building systems, the best agents can be replicated, extending the benefits of their superior performance.

As the GridWise Architectural Council defines the Service Oriented Grid, demand/response and site generation will be additional services proffered to the market by building-based agents. These autonomous agents will negotiate with the site-based system services, in response to the goals of the local enterprises, and with the awareness of live electricity pricing to offer load management services to the grid. These agents will manage the economical production of heightened amenities to the building occupants. This will be far more effective, and far better accepted than is central control of water heaters and building chillers by the grid.

It’s hard to give up control. Giving up control means giving up cherished perquisites of authority and the comfort well-worm processes. Giving up control means establishing objectives and letting others perform. But giving up control means the best and the brightest will work with you. Giving up control means that that your organization will be as intelligent as the sum of your staff, and not just as limited as you are. Giving up controls lets individual agents compete on the most economical provision of the best benefits. Giving up control increases the intelligence of any service, human or machine, as the creativity and skills of all our allowed to compete.

If we could only manage the impulse for control…

Data Driven Enterprise and Innovative Buildings.

Scott Thurm discussed the latest management meme, the data-driven enterprise in today’s Wall Street Journal. The article was in part a review of "Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense,” by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton. The article talks a lot about what it takes to base decisions on facts rather than assumptions. Recent and not-so-recent corporate failures on assumptions rather than hard data. To me, it emphasizes the pitfalls of selected the wrong data to watch.

Jeffrey Pfeffer describes managers so focused on perfecting today's business that they lose sight of tomorrow's. Quality-focused approaches may reduce defects, but hamper innovation. Enterprises must find long term success by gaining advantage by analyzing today's problems while looking creatively for tomorrow's opportunities. The problem, of course, is how to do this.

I think segmentation is a way to do this. Each small area of performance must focus on optimizing its processes. That cannot be the whole focus of management. As David

Girouard of Google observes, "A lot of analytical stuff will give you incremental improvement, but it won't give you a big leap…You can't time or plan for innovation. It can't come from customer data. It has to come from the heart of somebody with an idea."

The challenge is to find the balance between optimization and innovation. You may be wondering about another challenge, how I am going to tie this to building automation.

I think the answer lies in understanding that the span of optimization is small. Optimization is process oriented. Optimization looks at a small value chain, and finds incremental improvements. If you stretch the process too long, you lose site of the overall goals, and attain the optimizations afforded by government re-organization. No one would strive for that.

Innovation works in a different way, or rather two different ways. Innovation replaces a process with a whole new process, or it finds new value in arranging the existing processes in new ways. Preparing for innovation requires two things. (1) Processes must be defined in terms of outcomes so they can be replaced with entirely different processes. (2) Processes must have short enough spans of concern that the services they provide support new higher order processes as they are discovered.

In building systems this means:

• Keep the span of a process, and of the control system that runs the process, small. Do not over-integrate. One should e able to replace a process with a new one without re-doing the whole larger system.
• Define the outputs of each system in terms of service provided.
• Choose what you measure wisely, as measuring the wrong things will paint you into a box.

Interoperability enables innovation. Large processes can stifle innovation. True interoperability requires abstraction.

How do you think these ideas apply to building systems?

I may have to try out Second Life after all

Like many people, I’ve known of second life for a while. Unlike many, I have studiously avoided it. Two things can happen. (1) I won’t like it, and then that time was wasted. (2) I might like it, and if there is anything I do not need, it is to fall into my computer, and out of my first life, for more hours a day.

It is not that I am unaware of its potential. At the OASIS seminar this spring, an IBM executive described building his international technology and innovation center in second life, where technology leaders from around the world, otr at least the IBM world meat to discuss emerging technologies.

More intriguing was a student in my youngest daughter’s class in high school. From her reports, a significant portion of one of her classmate’s high school income came from extensions written for and sold in second life. I only hope they were some of the G-rated extensions and not the more adult extensions that I hear make a significant portion of the Second Life economy.

No, it was something else that finally engaged me. Today was the regularly scheduled oBIX meeting. In mid meeting, as I am trying to keep notes, I got an email about oBIX. A friend of mine had met someone with a second life name of Eolus McMillian from Implenia, who are part of a very interesting project called EOLUS. Eolus McMillian, or one of his peers, has apparently talked to me in his first life persona about oBIX.

The Eolus One initiative is an effort to deliver ground-breaking solutions in efficient energy management, virtual operations centers, and integrated order management on Second Life using the IBM and SAP platform. Eolus reaches out to “First Life” through, (what else) web services.

Eolus includes a component of energy monitoring, including predictive failures end performance monitoring. Somewhere in there fits the VWCI – the Virtual World Control Interface. VWCI reaches out from Second Life into web services on control systems.

http://www.ugotrade.com/2007/07/02/eolus-makes-leap-to-3d-internet-on-second-life/

Now I’m going to have to sign in to find out what they are up to.

Synapses between the Standards.

There are several large fat standards, or possibly standards of standards, that are struggling to be born right now. These large standards deal with capital assets and the way we describe and interact with them. These standards deal with energy and how we use it. These standards describe things that grew up before the effects of IT on how we look at systems. Now, they are learning to interact with the world of information.

I am more interested in the space between these standards. Just as in two areas of the brain trying to interact, the action is all at the synapses. It is at the synapses that new ideas are formed, and that new actions are embarked upon. Yet few are talking about the synapses. ll, missing the point.

The standards that I am currently focusing on are:

• NBIMS : This is what I would call Building Intelligence. Someone once said, “A Cynic knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” Well NBIMS is the cynic in the world of physical assets. It can describe everything, but it does not know what any of them are used for. Still, there is a lot of valuable knowledge embedded in the years of work of the IFC. Many of the objects within their realm actually tie out to things that business owners actually recognize that they bought. I am hoping to use these objects, and their names, in several realms. I am convinced that Building Intelligence is essential to addressing issues of performance and, comfort, and health, and of laying the groundwork for what FIATECH calls “The Self Maintaining, Self-Repairing Facility.
• oBIX: Building Controls are the opposite of NBIMS. They know everything that goes on in the building, but have no idea why. Building controls are detail oriented and process centric, and they expect those who communicate with them to be the same. As it is my home domain, where I work on my day job, am trying to get oBIX to learn from its neighbors. Intelligent Buildings meet Building Intelligence.
• GridWise . GridWise looks to recast power generation, transmission, distribution, and use into separate entities with knowable surfaces. It wants to enable intelligent e-commerce between the above, with no presumptions as to the business models followed. based upon the standards e-Business. It will require formal values-driven ontologies of power that can be consumed and priced in real time by consumer agents. The intelligent grid cannot exist without intelligent buildings.
• Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and Emergency Management. I lump these together not only because they work closely together, but because they both focus on situation awareness. OGC breaks the long-standing GIS model of “Tell me everything (in advance) that you want to know, I will put it all in my database, and let you query it in defined ways. OGC instead says “Geo-tag your sensors and expose them as web services. If I want them on my map I will ask my computer to surf to your server and map them. Google Earth Mash-ups become real time.

Where do we find the systems, the functions, to pull this together. I am a biologist by training, and I often consider how unappreciated is the value of pre-adaption to evolution. Gills could be calcified to become chests and hips. Stubby little fins could attach to calcified gills to support walking on land. Left over degenerative calcified gill structures could become bones of the ear.

In an analogous way, I think the structures discovered at the interface of NBIMS and oBIX become the pre-adaptations for discoverable abstract surfaces for enterprise interactions with buildings, including those of the Intelligent Grid. The intelligent interface that follows becomes the basis for abstract discoverable surfaces. These surfaces enable the development of agents that manage the customer faces of GridWise.

Emergency management wants two-way interaction with engineered systems, both ways probable relying on OGC metadata. Can EM send Distribution Elements to buildings / distribution grids / etc alerting them of current situations? What if I geo-tag my building sensors? What if I geo-tag my Sub-station data. Can sensors in engineered systems provide situational awareness the EM personnel during a situation?

This site is a meant as a mosh pit where these approaches, these domains can slam into one another. By moshing we can create the interactions that will discover the surfaces.

Please, don’t send me emails with your comments. Post your comments below, where it will be more fun for us all.