This article is about how Digital Twins is not what you think, how companies can utilize systems that can solve the skill shortage gap. It’s about how nothing changes, but everything will change.

Solving the skill shortage gap, forever.

Do you want to solve problems for real? Do you want to collaborate with experts all over the world, and realize the true potential of buildings from a lifecycle perspective? Do you want to stop making decisions in a vacuum and share ideas with others all over the world? Reach out to me here on Linkedin if interested and stay in tune with Beyond Buildings where we will announce something shortly. We are about ten people already from the entire lifecycle that want to solve problems for real, together. It is energy people, FM, technical asset managers, HVAC people, owners, construction, consultants, IoT-people, smart city people, and others. This article will also be featured at Automatedbuildings.com where my mentor Ken Sinclair resides. If interested you can always read some of the other articles that I wrote and see how they have aged over time.

But now, on to the article!

Introduction

This article will discuss a way to increase knowledge transfer and a way of tackling the skill-shortage gap in a future proof way. It is the combination of automation, digitalization, faster knowledge transfer through agreed-upon definitions of truth, that will solve the skill shortage gap in the short-to-medium-term. If everyone understands that only a few understand today, and even fewer people are needed to do what many people are doing, we get a double-whammy. Eventually, labor will be automated for the most part and the skill shortage gap will be no more.

A short audio clip about this challenge here to start with.

The future that everyone wants, and desperately needs

They had become legends. Not only in their organizations but also throughout the automotive industry. They had been the ones who realized that all the silo work did not lead to anything. The impact they needed always took too long, and it had been too hard, if not impossible to track changes and create ways to continuously learn from their mistakes. They did not understand the underlying technology of these modern tools, but they could very well understand the benefits and the new world order. They understood that if nothing changes, nothing will change. And they wanted to be the change they saw that was necessary. And because of that, they were hailed as legends, with a legacy far beyond anything that they could imagine.

Just imagine if the CEO, CFO, head of HR, Marketing, CTO, and some product managers and the head of the AI team was working on the strategy together in real-time. And a couple of the board members wanted to be in on these sessions because they were so much fun. And everyone understood each other. They were all talking, laughing, and changing launch dates, and how this could affect the other teams, and what a change in one area might lead to advancements in another area. And also, what problems might be incurred. The system they were building their decisions on worked in a way so that it not only answered questions, but also provided insight, and recommendations based on the output that they were looking for and found optimal conditions in real-time. It took in data from existing systems, no matter the source. Internal, external, from a local setting, from the world. Suddenly the CFO could make an instantaneous decision if they would go for a faster time to market, sacrificing potential recalls. But the upside would be an extra 2,5-2,8 Billion over the next three years which would allow them entry to other strategic areas. The AI team had seen an exponential increase in the organizational impact they were having, and the word had spread to other automotive manufacturers that still worked in silos, with disparate data sets, that they had succeeded where others were still struggling. Where data scientists were still cleaning data, and never realizing true value because of a lack of incomplete data sets, and a challenge in comparing data from different sources. And if they went for the lighter alloy, that cost more, but it made them slide under a weight standard, so they could classify the car differently so they would save hundreds of millions from a fleet perspective. And the lifecycle testing for all the function owners, and everything in the car, that once had taken them 6-8 months, were now cut in half even though the increased the number of use cases exponentially, and that their answers were more accurate than ever before. And they could use the data in a much different way during the entire lifecycle, and communicate, collaborate between silos, leading to exponential value increase. The most interesting part was that nothing really changed in how they worked. But at the same time, everything changed for the better.

How? Simple.

“Suddenly the Innovation platform ate culture for breakfast, lunch and dinner”

They had something they all could agree on that was fed real-time data from everywhere. Visualized in a way so that everyone could understand how it all came together. For them, it was a car. It was their factories. It was the organization. For others, it might be a truck, a building, a city, a ship, a turbine, a coffee-machine – anything that has a physical presence in space and time. They had the 3D models, but they were only used in silos. It was only when they managed to put all the pieces together that they understood it had always been that easy. The solution had been there all the time. After decades of political and hierarchical struggles, everyone could now base all their decisions on one true source. It was more than a Digital Twin. It was beyond buildings, and beyond everything, they had ever wanted. It was an innovation platform that revolutionized how they, and everyone else made decisions in the manufacturing space. No more biased decisions and agendas. Just fact-based decision making leveraging other people’s expertise, that was constantly aligned with the corporate mission and vision.

The tides had turned and no longer did culture eat strategy for breakfast. Now, the Innovation platform ate culture for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Yes, the world would surely head this way eventually. But they were first to it. And they could stay there for a long while because they were making data-driven decisions and eliminating waste faster, and better than anyone else in the business. Finally, they could let their size, scale, talent within the walls, and modern technology come together to do all the things that they, and everyone wished they could do. All thanks to a new perspective of a century-old problem.

Setting the stage – skill shortage and knowledge transfer

Imagine a large something that looks like any other large something. It could be a building, a ship, a truck, a car, or even a city. We got systems that are not necessarily connected, there is the old with the new and there’s always decisions being made from assumptions. If we think about a factory or a large commercial building we can see that there’s maybe one person who knows how it really operates because they have been there from the beginning. They might know how the factory works but how could they know how their decisions would affect other people? How would they know that their decisions would be aligned with the goals of the company?

The decisions of one will no doubt have an effect on the mix of people from other disciplines,

• IT
• HR
• OT
• IoT
• MSIs,
• CEOs
• CFOs
• CTOs
• Owners
• Tenants
• Engineers
• Marketing
• Consultants
• FM companies
• Functional owners
• Portfolio managers
• Technical asset managers

And in the future, all the other unknowns that want to offer services to whatever it is the company needs to utilize to bring better value for their stakeholders.

We are not only looking at a skill shortage gap, but also the skill transfer/knowledge transfer gap.

• How, if ever, can we make these people agree on a shared truth?
• How can we enable collaboration and communication between experts in their respective field, and with people with zero understanding of HVAC, lighting, pneumatics, valves, BACnet, vendor lock-in, the cost to do something, where stuff is, etc, etc.
• How do we get them to collaborate?
• How do we transfer the knowledge from the one person who knows everything, into the minds of the 5 people with different backgrounds, working in separate parts of the organization/building?
• How do we agree on a shared truth between engineers when they only have access to BI-dashboarding tools, that offer a glimpse into a part of the building that is also reserved only for experts?

“Trying to learn what Web Services Digital Twins are by dissecting the acronyms is like trying to learn how to drive by studying an automatic transmission” –

(Paraphrasing) by The Legend Steve Tom (from his seminal article about BACnet/WS in 2004)

Agreeing on something that is based in space and time

Everyone is trying to make simulations of how the real world will operate. People are doing it in the automotive space, industry 4.0 initiatives, building automation, anything manufacturing, and in all areas where there’s business. And companies are failing. Miserably so. Everyone is starting to say that they have got Digital Twins operating for them and they already have the keys to the kingdom. Most of them are wrong.

It is simple. Everyone is just working on their sliver of reality from a real-world puzzle and their so-called digital twins also operate in silos. Everyone is using BI-dashboards that only make sense within their own discipline, and experts cannot explain what they do to someone else outside their frame of reference. Decisions are made in vacuums.

But what is the one thing that they all should agree on, but find it hard to do? Well in the automotive industry, it is the cars, the trucks, that they work with.

For buildings, it is… yeah, you guessed it. Buildings!

So, let’s say we have a factory.

That factory consists of systems that are usually not interconnected. And they also consist of HVAC systems, the actual pipes and plumbing, and people with responsibilities in different areas.

–          Suddenly! A pipe bursts on the far-left hand side of the factory!!!

–          What to do? The one in charge of that has no clue where it leads to, and their BI dashboard does not show the correlations to the entire plant, only their area!

–          The one that knew all this retired a month ago and the 4 people in charge do not know where to start and how everything is connected.

–          And the one person that has an idea, cannot explain well enough, nor get the understanding from all the different dashboards.

–          What to do?

Luckily – they invested in an innovation platform the other week that solves these challenges! What does it do?

–          They have integrated the data from different applications across silos into an innovation platform that is built upon a Digital Twin database.

–          It absorbs data from any kind of source, irrespective of standard, API, and it makes sense of the world as it is by mapping data sources to a non-industry specific ontology.

–          Initially, data was mapped towards the visual aspects of the Digital Twin and attached to CAD/BIM/GIS data from a template building/the real building to enable people to understand and see the space that they are all in.

–          Everyone can see why the pump burst, what it is related to in the entire factory, and they can all agree with what the problem is, and what the solution is. As well as run simulations about what will happen if they do x y and z, and get suggestions from the system itself.

–          They can quickly come together and determine what needs to be done since the systems are talking to each other, and that people can communicate around a one true source that is the visual digital twin. Not just dashboards.

–          Other data that hasn’t been available help them in an invisible way of making decisions by eliminating possible outcomes that are too risky, too costly, or will lead to unintended consequences for any of the other disciplines in the factory/or organization.

This pipe bursting is of course a hypothetical case since this would not have happened in the first place. Everything would have been connected and this would have been prevented before it happened. Managing risk is after all one of the major benefits with a connected innovation platform.

i. Data to impact loop and the components of an innovation platform based on digital twin technology.

Why this is important

Since everyone today is working in silos, ALL companies have a problem creating solutions that work flawlessly in the real world. Therefore, companies are not realizing their expected return on investment when executing AI-initiatives and analytics efforts in scale. People are not collaborating as they should be, and there are not the laughs and real-time decisions we read about at the beginning of the article. People are not hailed as heroes, legends, and heroines. It’s more scapegoats, and everyone is trying to protect their piece of the fiefdom. Entire organizations have a problem seeing the big picture and this is detrimental for the world since we need better solutions now. Maybe even yesterday.

The skill shortage gap will not go away in the short term, but this is a vital approach in automating work that should be automated. As well as minimizing the dependency on people that knows everything. With an approach like this we can see increased levels of collaboration and communication, and faster time to market for innovative ideas, control strategies for the built environment, and more holistic undertakings at large.

Key Takeaways

Digital twins can be more than just the interconnected things visualized in a Business intelligence dashboard. Having just the data pieces from one silo is like driving with one eye open at night, with no lights on, trying to communicate to a deaf person about where you are in a place you never visited before.

And having only the visual representations with no data doesn’t matter much either because only a fraction of decisions can be made and people won’t know if they are the right ones or not.

The opportunity with digital twins that mirror the real world is to further facilitate communication and collaboration between silos of people, systems, and industries, allowing and enabling us to create value at every step. To understand the world. And to make decisions that are affected by more factors than the one in respective silos. Forget about the talk about much-needed agreement on what a digital twin is. Forget about agreeing to one standard. Forget about the focus on technology and instead focus on where you are today, where you want to go, and how you can get there in the fastest, most sustainable way possible. By understanding where you want to go, you can suddenly ask vendors how well their solutions cater to the end result you want to see. If you need some help in coming up with questions, reach out!

Misunderstand me correctly, I love talking about technology and it’s extremely important to select the correct piece of tech, with an enabling view having the end goal in sight. It’s important to involve experts in the nitty-gritty stuff and to make use of the people, the talent, and the systems that exist today. Because it’s very easy to make the wrong decisions which might lead to everything but an agile organization.

The truth is that I just want to help others succeed. And it’s through a holistic understanding of technology, people, organizations and what the world will do in a week, a month, a year from now on, that I am able to see the future before it happens. And the way I do this is by talking to other people, learning from my customers, and I just want to know more, so that I can help out more.

That is why find this interesting, and tragic at the same time, that communication across disciplines does not happen, at all. For buildings, it’s the entire life cycle. Communication does not happen within the different disciplines during the construction phase. BIM (construction digital twins) are not modus operandi, and it does not take into account ALL aspects of the construction process, only the BIM side of things. 5D, 6D are still tools for the trade, and experts residing in that narrow point in time that is a construction where the focus should be on the operating phase and the entire lifecycle. Data does not get exponentially increased during the lifecycle and a lot of data die during handovers, where there is a rush to get things done. And the utilization of modern tools in the property management phase in a holistic, organizational way with an enabling mindset is not how the world operates. Yet.

This is why WE need to go beyond buildings, understand the benefits that need to be derived, use modern technology to do things better, and start realizing the TRUE potential of both buildings and the organizations that deal with them.

If you have read this far and want to solve these challenges, let me know. Like I stated in the beginning, I have got about ten people that have signed up for solving the problems in this industry in a holistic way. But more is needed and I have some extremely interesting projects coming up where we are populating a digital twin with the HVAC side of things, Fire, safety, lighting, BAS, BMS, everything, and it will be an innovation playground for us to start doing this in scale.

My role is to advise decision-makers and companies what the world is going to do a month, a year, a decade from now. WINNIIO has a complete understanding of what is needed to stand out from the competition, advise on pros and cons, and be the strategic partner for both technology and organization-advice in a Smart World Environment (Construction/Industry/Smart Buildings and Cities).

If you liked this article and want others to read it to, please share!

And of course, it would be great if you can comment, like, subscribe, or just stay tuned for the next one!

My role is to advise decision-makers and companies what the world is going to do a month, a year, a decade from now. WINNIIO has a complete understanding of what is needed to stand out from the competition, advise on pros and cons, and be the strategic partner for both technology and organization-advice in a Smart World Environment (Construction/Industry/Smart Buildings and Cities).

Please reach out if you have any questions on how to get started, get going, or how to succeed in the next decade!

Sincerely,

Nicolas Waern

Digital Transformation Expert – Helping companies find their role in a Smart City Context

WINNIIO

What do we need to do to steer this planet in the right direction? What are the challenges and why are existing efforts not providing tangible results? And most of all, what can be done to change this?

A lot of existing Net-zero ambitions, discussions and energy related strategies are like that of a ship, with holes in the bottom. Where everyone is focused on steering the ship in the right direction.”

         Nicolas Waern

Except that it’s not just one ship, but an armada of ships, leaking, and not necessarily pointing in the right directions. A lot of innovation theatre going on in a lot of industries. The need for sustainable impact acceleration in all industries is evident. But why, and how can we get there? How do we get the behaviour change necessary to do a course correction that will lead to sustainable impact?

“Energy efficiency is particularly important in this decade, offering opportunities to reduce emissions quickly as well as reducing the overall investment requirements of net zero goals and making our net zero goals more achievable. As part of people-centred clean energy transitions, an emphasis on energy efficiency also provides an opportunity to create more jobs, support economic growth and industrial output. However, the current scale of energy efficiency action is not sufficient and there is a need to accelerate implementation on a global level.

·        Faster action on efficiency-related measures can avoid an extra 95 EJ of energy demand by 2030 even as the economy grows

·        Enhanced efficiency-related measures provide one third of the emissions reductions needed for net zero.”

The value of urgent action on energy efficiency

Doing something well, that shouldn’t be done at all

As discussed before, I believe we need to simulate the future to transcend the now. What this means is that we need to go from the impact we want, and reverse engineer that to the steps we need to take. Just calling for urgent action doesn’t cut it. We can see that. Because we don’t know how long it takes for actions to actually deliver any impact. So the whole premise of calling for action is flawed from the beginning.

One of the highlights however from the analysis above is related to the need for efficiency. Efficiency in the existing systems that we have. Because most of the time, it seems that we mistake the lack of effect with a lack of electricity. And a lack of real-time data with that also of transparency and granularity.

We need all of this, and more. But how? And what does this mean?

Going Nuclear

One of the best examples is something that I heard about the nuclear situation in Finland. If they had just spent a fraction of the money, they have been spending on building something new and shiny on making existing systems more efficient. They would not have needed to build the nuclear power plant. Something which Sweden obviously should take into account now that we are trying to build out new modular nuclear power plants to support electrification needs at scale.

For me, all of this is just a big joke which reminds me of the time when Steve Jobs was paraphrasing Gil Amelio. “Apple is like a ship, with holes in the bottom. And it’s my job to steer the ship in the right direction”.

Which brings back the urgency to make existing systems more efficient. Because building something new, that shouldn’t have been built at all, is such an enormous waste.

·        Faster action on efficiency-related measures can avoid an extra 95 EJ of energy demand by 2030 even as the economy grows

·        Enhanced efficiency-related measures provide one third of the emissions reductions needed for net zero

NZTwork – A decentralized part(s) of the global solution

There is a lack for granular real-time insight in what is going on behind the meter. A lot of grid owners are starting to pay out large sums to industries and real-estate owners if they can make visible to the energy producers what is invisible today. The reason for this is that they want to predict what will happen with the grid to have more balance.

As mentioned before, I have been architecting this Smart Energy System development project in Sweden since the last couple of years.

–        A call from the Wild

–        Digital Twins of Smart Heating Systems

We are using a wireless mesh approach, to get real-time granular insight, and control from multiple sensors in the buildings. Where we are both partnering up with 3^rd party analytics engines. And in the process of developing self-learning algorithms based on a contextual understanding of weather, and what energy mix is being used at any given point in time.

And six months ago, we started to think about how we could leverage this to create global impact. We being the founder of Conectric Wireless Mesh, Phillip Kopp. And a new acquantaince that was in the same crypto investment group as I was, “X” Xuezhi Hu.

We looked at Helium as a starting point and we wanted to do something similar. But, not just a data information network, but something that would make sure to deliver data, insight, and a pathway to action as well as impact. We are now a group of people who have rallied together to create value and impact on a global scale.

The impact being energy efficiency. And after a while we connected the increasing value as well as demand of Carbon Credits as a potential carrot to help companies, individuals, everyone, to save money while making money and providing real-time insight where there is none.

Modern tools in the right order

You can read more about it at NZTwork, or reach out directly if you want to know more. But in short we want to leverage the power of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations to create an insight marketplace for everyone to take advantage of. No vendor-lockin, just quality data that can be turned into information, insight, action, to deliver intended impact.

Where the difference to a lot of existing technologies and projects is that we have bi-directional command in real time at the heart of all of this. With multiple patents related to real-time grid control, frequency regulation and node balancing at its core. With a software stack that has been developed with blockchain applications in mind.

If we can help individuals, as well as companies save more energy, provide granular ESG reporting, and help them create carbon credits in the process, we believe we can accelerate the path to net-zero journeys worldwide. It has to be a wallet play. Pun intended for the initiated, but to be honest, it all has to be about money. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it is what the world is all about.

Saving money, making more money, and finding new ways of making money.

–        This way, individuals will get help in saving money, with getting recommendations about how to optimize energy efficiency based on a contextual understanding

–        Grid owners will get more transparency and can optimize grids much better leading to a system of system efficiency where they can provide better services, to more people faster

–        Opens up new markets for frequency regulation, distributed energy plays, and also in the interim provides trusted carbon credits in real-time to a market where there’s an exponential demand, and a limited supply.

Incentivising/monetizing behaviour to realize maximum impact

Money. That’s the thing. The challenges with this is of course if we are contributing to more carbon credits in the market, then we are also somewhat perpetuating the status quo. However, with the acceleration of more effiency, and real-time insight, we have a much higher chance of reaching an intended impact faster. And time to value is everything.

Just imagine a future scenario where we can transfer energy from one side of the grid to the next one. As well as have decentralised grid control where smart grids and local energy communities are able to operate on their own. We are in the midst of signing up partners, advisors, and investors right now. Where my other day-job scaling up a global Digital Twin will also come in handy.

Examples being utilizing both Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality to better explain and disseminate knowledge as well as recipes for impact

·        Oracle Explores the Future of Energy at New Smithsonian FUTURES Exhibit

·        The future of Energy Walkthrough

If you have read this far, please tell me. Because I have no idea if anyone actually reads these articles or not. And if you have read this far and want to know more, or help change the world together, again, just reach out!

And like I always say, it’s my job to know what the future will do in a week, a month, a year from now. And if you want to create the future before everyone else? Reach out to me and we’ll make it happen!

Sincerely,

Nicolas Waern
CEO, Founder and Digital Twin Specialist at WINNIIO Consulting

Ceo@winniio.io

Nicolas Waern is the CEO, Strategy & Innovation Leader, and a Digital Twin Implementation Specialist at the consulting firm WINNIIO. He is a firm believer that the Real Estate Industry needs more of a lifecycle focus where we need to go Beyond Buildings and come back with an understanding what tools and technology we could use. And to solve the jobs to be done, together, with an open mindset.

Nicolas is working with leaders in several industries to understand how they can succeed in the age of AI. Predicting what the world will do in a week, a month, a year from now and to best utilize strategies and solutions that pass the test of time. He does this through a Digitalization- on Demand approach for anyone that needs to change before they have to.

Nicolas is also a Podcast Creator & Newsletter Editor for Beyond Buildings
Thought Leader regarding Smart Buildings & Building Automation for AutomatedBuildings
Speaker and Influencer Event Streaming Platforms as the Holy Grail for Industry 4.0 Applications
Subject Matter Expert Real Estate Digitalization Proptech Digitalization Expert
Active Member of Digital Twin working groups Digital Twin Subject Matter Expert

In this episode of the Beyond Buildings Podcast, we talk to Chris Hallendy and Chad Ruch from Resolute Building Intelligence.

We get to hear their amazing journey from the software side of things, venturing into the unknowns of building automation and how they started, got going, and now succeeding in creating intelligent buildings.

We talk about the 3 seashell-strategy, Layer Cakes, and why Chris hates the buzzword bingo around AI and Machine Learning.

This is an extremely interesting and insightful episode and this could be the very blueprint for the future when it comes to software companies learning real estate. You’ll get to understand where Smart Buildings are today and where the future is heading. 

Listen in to a phenomenal episode about the past, present, and future of Smarter Buildings and a more intelligent World.

Please leave a comment, share your thoughts, and give us some input on how we can improve for the future! Because it’s the data we don’t have, that will change our lives!

“Taking Buildings to the Cloud and into the Future” is also out at Anchor and all places where Podcasts live! And finally a big thank you to Chris and Chad at Resolute Building Intelligence

Complementary Slides

AI Layer cake. The cake will tilt at some point if the foundation is not solid enough.

Links:

• Chris Hallendy, Chief Executive Officer at Resolute Building Intelligence
• Chad Ruch, Director of Technical Communications at Resolute Building Intelligence
• Nicolas Waern, Podcast Creator, Strategy & Innovation Expert at WINNIIO