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?

Microgrid - Black Island Style

I met Chris Martin when we were sketching out the IT architecture for embedded systems on the UNC campus. He would sit quietly at the edge of the conversation, smile, and occasionally lob a penetrating question over the assumptions of the discussion. His quiet good humor overlaid a flexible mind to strop my arguments on. In an abstract way, I considered him an ally in the overall efforts, but like many co-workers, I didn’t really know much about him.

I did know that his mind grappled easily with distributed reliability, and DC houses, and microgrids. This week, I learned of what he described as his first real job as an engineer. He had worked in Antarctica, installing the power systems for the Black Island Telecommunications center

Black Island is home to the telecommunications center for Antarctica. Its conditions are bitter cold, and isolated. The center’s energy needs are large, unceasing, and growing. Because McMurdo Station, the primary Antarctic camp, has all satellite communications blocked by Mount Erebus, all communications are routed through Black Island.

It is beyond difficult to bring supplies and fuel in. The Telecommunications Center is only accessible by helicopter or a dangerous two-day traverse over the Ross Ice Shelf. A traditional approach would have been diesel generators, but the difficulty of refueling the site made that option undesirable as the primary fuel.

The Black Island microgrid was designed to minimize the run-time and fuel use, and thereby reduce maintenance and supply costs, while providing for the constant high energy needs of running the station.

The first microgrid at Black Island was a couple wind turbines to charge the 24 volt DC power supply that the communication system runs on. The generator only ran when the batteries started to get low and wind was not running. Over time, t he power requirements of the Black Island have steadily increased; along with expanded MacMurdo communications, the site now also supports a NASA tracking station. The site now runs on 3 wind turbines, a photovoltaic array, and three diesel generators.

In some ways, the photovoltaic array is the most interesting aspect. In a site that gets full sun for only three months a year, and is in complete darkness for several months, photovoltaic generation might seem like fashion trumping sense. Actually, in a location where fuel handling and delivery are expensive, the additional reliability and flexibility added by another type of power generation, as opposed to a fourth turbine, increases the reliability and economy of the entire installation.

Black Island offers horrible conditions. The demands of the communications systems for reliable power are immense; maintenance is difficult and expensive. The site is in absolute darkness for months at a time while the temperature hovers around negative 70 degrees Fahrenheit. This site is far more demanding than any home or office. Still, with large power demands, fierce conditions, and little opportunity for maintenance, the installation has had essentially no downtime since 1985 while maintaining the highest standards of low environmental impact.

In science, the exception proves, or tests, the rule. In law, hard cases make bad law. In engineering, difficult and unusual demands bring out the greatest creativity, as every assumption and rule is challenged. Black Island does not look like a home, or even an office. Black Island does point the way to reliable power in the home and neighborhood.

Microgrids let the home, or office, or even neighborhood or office park, find a path to local clean power, even enough for today’s high-tech appetites. Using a variety of generation strategies, chosen for the site and its special demands, provides robustness. Generators, and their messy hydrocarbon storage and regular maintenance are the fly in that ointment. Transactional grid purchases guided by live pricing can replace the local generator in many cases. What is left is clean reliable power, immune to shocks on the larger power grid, while still using the power grid to enhance reliability, when the price is right.

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.

Would you use SVG or XAML?

We are currently in the middle of a multi-million dollar energy management project at the University of North Carolina. There are many aspects of it, including creating generic web-service gateways to a variety of underlying low-level protocols (BACnet, LON, Sigma, KNX) and aggregating them up to a central monitoring system we call the Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS).

All interaction with EBMS is through secured web pages developed with open source code. These incorporate into graphics generated from a number of sources including AutoCAD DWG files as well as a number of control panel widgets. All use AJAX calls against the EBMS server and the building gateways to display interactive data and allow building operation.

The RFP/Specification calls for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as the primary format for for “EBMS Dynamic Color Graphics”… in no uncertain terms, the spirit of the specification Application has been that the system graphics would be in an open, XML based, vector format. When we all started this project, the only format meeting those qualifications was SVG. Recently the vendor came back to me and pleaded to be able to use XAML.

In the years since the project started, Opera has gained good native SVG rendering, but almost no SVG behaviors. Firefox support OK SVG rendering, but does not support islands of XML/SVG inside a larger page, and offers little support for SVG behaviors. The major plug-in for SVG with good support of behaviors was from Adobe who has abandoned it since they bought Flash. Corel, who supported it as the project began, has virtually erased all references to the effort. SVG is getting some small traction as SVG Mobile in the mobile phone industry.

If we switch from SVG, this leaves XAML as our Scalable Vector-based XML graphics format. Yeah, its dancing with Redmond, but it at least seems to have some tools, and support for open coding frameworks. The Linux community appears to have already released a Silverlight [XAML] plug-in beta, and Microsoft is set to release this week an official Linux plug-in.

Microsoft has, despite requests, not released the XAML specification to W3. This is explained alternately as Redmond==Evil or as not wanting to put a boat anchor on innovations until a couple iterations are up. Both accusations probably have some truth.

So, would you let the Integrator switch from SVG to XAML? How would you approach integrating graphics from diverse sources including CAD into the one you favor? If the answer is SVG, what are your favorite tools for interactivity?