What if you owned an intelligent building?

What if your building could respond to you and your tenants? What if your building could respond to normal business processes, so that a simple invitation to reserve a room on Saturday set the operating rules for the air conditioning and security systems? What if your tenants did not have to hunt down staff to interact with the building? What if a single system could reduce your costs, while offering your tenants higher amenities? What would that be worth to you?

What if you could tell how well your building was operating, without expensive on-site expertise? What if you could eliminate unnecessary maintenance? What if your building could tell you when it needed a filter change, so you never replaced one unnecessarily? What if building system problems were fixed before your tenants knew about them. What would that be worth to you?

What if you could share system operating information with off-site experts who would tell you what to fix before it breaks? What if you could find air conditioning problems in the spring instead of waiting until a hot day in summer? What if by accessing the live energy prices your building saw, every repair recommendation included the energy cost in dollars per week of not making the repair. What if you could always schedule repairs to never have down-time and never inconvenience your tenants. What if your properties became known for this level of service? What would that be worth to you?

What if you could tell your building when the repair contractor is coming? What if your security system could let him in, using his company badge, to just the rooms he needs for the repair? What if your building logged his movements, and the time he arrived and left, for you? What if that log were linked to the original service order? What would that save you, in time, in billings, and in staff?

What if your building could protect itself, and your expensive equipment from the power quality electricity we get from the power company? What if you never had to replace motors in pumps, and in compressors, and elsewhere because they were damaged by the brown-out six months before? What would you save if all your equipment lasted as long as it was designed to last? What would that be worth to you?

What if your building could negotiate with the power company, buying electricity when it was cheapest, and storing it for when it was expensive? What if you could use power storage to ensure that your tenants never had a brown-out, never a black-out? What if you could sell your tenants power that would not damage their computers, not damage their equipment. What if your properties became known for this level of protection? What would that be worth to you?

What if your energy costs could be predictable? What if you could use your ability to store power to disconnect from the grid when conditions were right? What if you could use this ability to sell energy options back to the power company, and get new revenue from your building? What would that be worth to you?

What if you had an intelligent buildng? What would that be worth to you?

Second Generation Outsourcing

“Work will be done where it makes the most sense” Nandan Nilekani, CEO, Infosys

Today’s so-called enterprise systems for building management are like first generation outsourcing. It seemed like a good idea move the work to where it was the cheapest to do. It was all sourced to one set of developers because it seemed easiest. No one asked what the service metrics really were; no one asked about quality and efficiency. Now, as communications problems mount, the customers are feeling a little queasy about the whole process.

Some respond by in-sourcing. The problem is, there was never a model for system development before we turned over everything to the control companies and their single purpose software. There was no commonly accepted approach to communications between facilities and the rest of the enterprise. Business managers sense there is a lot of value there, but can find no way to unlock it. As Tom Sanzone, CIO of Credit Suisse has said “…cost in and of itself isn’t going to get anyone a competitive advantage.”

In the second generation of outsourcing, smart companies look to more than cost. They look to organizations that can provide a deep bench of talent skilled in a particular domain. Smart companies disaggregate functions and look to by whom and where each function can best be provided. Processes are isolated. Processes are broken into tasks and the tasks reviewed for how much value they add and how much they need to interact with core processes of the enterprise. Each task is assigned to where the most value can be achieved, not merely to where the cost is cheapest.

As building systems start to communicate with the enterprise, we need to look at them in the same light. Some of this happens far from IT. Engineers should design new systems, not low bid contractors. Talent should be transferred from commissioning to design. The ability of systems to communicate with the enterprise in the language of the enterprise must become paramount.

Most companies do not have an in-place team able to effectively manage building system performance. Once clean communication standards are in place, building performance analysis should be sources to organizations that have enough depth to pay attention and enough breadth to do it well.

Whether actual maintenance is performed by in-house staff or by outside service, it should be driven by knowledge, not by schedule and anecdote. On outsourced building performance analysis group is an excellent driver for the work, as well as an auditor for how well the work is done. It the maintenance is outsources, appropriate and term limited access to the building should be managed by clear communications between the requester, the dispatcher, and the building security systems. This can only work of those communications are well defined and formal – in other words, abstract.

When we achieve standard for formal service-oriented analysis and tracking of the services of building maintenance and operations, we will have also achieved standards for proper interaction with the enterprise. This will let building systems move beyond least cost as the sole metric.

Until we do, we will continue to view building systems as we do poorly outsourced help desks: unresponsive, infuriating, and unintelligible.

Products We Almost Bought

Before we settled on our current Enterprise Building Management System at UNC, we came close to buying several off the shelf products that just could not fit us into their marketing model. We were OK with their revenue goals, large as they were, for selling their product to a campus our size. We could have made their architecture work. Their bits were already shrink-wrapped and on CD. Their products would have been a less risky buy. Somehow, they just couldn’t bring themselves to sell it.

We had a few hard and fast goals going in.

1. We wanted to get low level control protocols off the enterprise backbone.
2. We wanted to remove spurious interactions between the embedded systems of disparate buildings.
3. We wanted to be able to orchestrate behaviors across a large campus.
4. Where previously some “less important” buildings had been no cost effective to control, we wanted to extend control to all buildings. It was acceptable to have less nuanced control in simpler buildings.

We also wanted to add some new enterprise interactions that required that we be able to interact with building systems at a higher or more abstract level.

5. We wanted to be able to open up direct access to reading certain kinds of information to our customers [tenants]. This requires that, say, a temperature be recognizable as a temperature and mapped to a particular space.
6. We wanted to be able to expose a programmable interface to functions such as operation scheduling (not configuration) to customers.
7. This required that we have a security model of services that we could map to organizational staff and responsibilities.
8. We wanted to be able to compare live operational postures with live meter readings to determine how effective our energy saving modes actually were.

A few products came close to this. Enterprise Energy Management Systems consumed lower level protocols and offered user interfaces for the control room. They allowed us to define operation postures (code blue energy saving) to invoke when we needed to. They offered Web Services interaction with the enterprise so we could let enterprise developers work with them.

We just couldn’t get those vendors to sell us any product. You see, the market model we proposed didn’t fit the way they were used to selling it.

These applications were all designed with a traditional focus on The Man In The Control Room. They brought all control protocols back to the Server In The Control Room. They exposed a limited number of postures for the entire campus through their web services.

We wanted to use these applications differently. We wanted to place an “Enterprise Server” at each building. All control protocols would then never travel outside the building. The limited number of web services definitions for the campus would then be a plentiful number to use for each building. Security could then be defined for each building, rather than for the whole campus.

The vendors priced their product for one server for campus, and the price was steep. We were willing to pay a premium for our model, but not a multiplier as large as the number of buildings we had. Could we arrange some sort of site licensing, letting the vendor achieve their revenue goals for a project of this size, but letting us install the bits in multiple buildings?

The salesman would nod, frown, and have to go back to headquarters to check. In multiple visits, they would report back that they had been unable to get an answer.

Some of the large controls companies and energy companies have asked me since then why we didn’t buy their product. My only answer is, “We tried. You couldn’t find a way to let us buy it.”

Six Sigma Solutions don’t work unless you have six sigma problems

Sometimes I wonder if the problem I have talking to the members of the building controls industry is that they have been badly managed for two long. You can tell someone who has been bludgeoned into using one tool for everything, because they want to use that tool for everything. They can lose their judgment and like a two year old with a hammer, decide everything is a nail.

Quality management is a wonderful discipline. It has improved every aspect of our lives while driving down costs. We daily expect quality that was unimaginable just a few years ago. Still, there is a darker side to these movements.

Much has been written of how 3M destroyed its culture of creativity and invention by inappropriate application of Six Sigma methodologies. Manufacturing quality improved. Shipping reliability improved. Yet no one was able to invent in accord with the process management methodology. “Last year we had 2 inventions per month; through careful management we to have expect 2.7 per lab throughout this quarter.” It sounds silly if you say it out loud. And yet, it nearly killed 3M.

All these quality methodologies have a common focus on process. All processes must be defined, and documented, and repeatable. This is great when the controls companies are making the sensors and the controllers that go above my ceiling. It is great when they are shipping them on time. It has nothing to do with how they are installed, or designed, or run in today's market.

As the director of Building Services at UNC said to me last month “You know who designed the control systems – it’s some guy who works for the low bidder standing on a bucket”. And he’s right. This area could use some process and repeatability. It could use design improvements. It would be nice if it was designed at all. If you want to use process optimization, work on that.

But don’t try to make the building owner or tenant focus on your process.

This focus on process lets the self-absorbed product engineer in the large building systems company tell himself that the lousy controls protocols we have today are any good. All of them, and I include oBIX, raise focus on the process, make understanding the process critical to interacting with the system, and thereby reduce the value of their systems.

When I interact with a Six Sigma warehouse, I know the goods will be shipped on time. If my clerk is on a first name basis with each person on the loading dock, I know that there are regular problems. When I interact with a six sigma manufacturer, I do it in part so that I do not need to know the details of their returns policy.

Stop making me know what is going on in your control systems. That is not an enterprise interface. And the sale cycles and upgrade rates of the building systems industry will stay awful until the industry recognizes this.