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

Questionnaire about interoperability, benefits management, cruise-line discussion about next gen connectivity and digital t(wins), construction 4.0, Robotics process automation, stream processing…

A pretty interesting day that started at 6 am and finished at midnight. I think it was on Friday that I got an inquiry into a Cruise ship digitalization something. Apparently this company wanted to go all-in now that their entire fleet was stuck in ports more or less. It reminded me of this article about airplanes being stuck in airports and elsewhere due to COVID and Corona.

What better time to do some maintenance, get them ready to be deployed, bigger, and better than before? And also utilize the 3D models that went into building the ship for added data-driven decision making during the whole lifecycle?

The scope, as it was from the beginning, was about;

1. Mesh sensoring x 10 000 sensors, mostly around occupancy, but also IAQ- related, doors, windows, and whatever else. In order to create a nervous system of connectivity for the entire ship.
2. Digital Twin technology, to be able to ingest these sensors, and any other data that they wanted to make sense of in a scalable way. No matter the origin, but ingested in a Digital Twin database of the ship.
3. A way to transport data in real-time or near real-time both onboard the ship, as well as from the ship back to the shore. To also make decisions based on location, and other metrics influencing the ship’s journey. A suggested way to do this is of course stream processing from i.e. Kafka and Confluent to create a streaming platform of data both on the edge, as well as to the cloud and back. It’s in a way similar to this use case from Royal Caribbean and Knoldus that I got from the Confluent guru himself Kai Waehner, who’s the all-knowing person when it comes to anything real-time.And the ask was perhaps even more similar to another Shipping use case I was indirectly involved with a year ago. That was a shipping company with contracts to over hundred of companies that owned a total of 1000+ ships. They had about 50 sensors on each ship that collected data every 30 minutes. So I guess about a couple of million messages passed their streaming platform architecture on a daily basis. I believe that infrastructure was based on Azure, utilizing Azure VM. At the time, and I still do, believe it’s the way to go when shuffling data in a smart building/smart portfolio and a smart city setting.
4. And the fourth item of the tech-bucket list was Blockchain, DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology to create a secure and tamper-proof messaging system. This also goes hand in hand with modern digital twin creation platforms.

Read more about shipping

You can read more about the shipping case here at Optimizing shipping operations if you are interested. It was only a part of the day, but definitely an interesting part nonetheless.

Benefits Realization Questionnaire & MSI vetting

The original ask was to help a company providing peace of mind to property owners to come up with questions relevant to the building operations staff. Partly to assess their own as-is situation and also separate questionnaires for asking the right questions to future partners and systems integrators. They had seen from the past that pure technical plays didn’t work out and that there’s more to succeeding with building operations than just technology.

The first thing that came to mind was the Amazing book by Ward & Daniel, Benefits Realization.

Starting from the end is the key that a lot of companies miss. What are the actual outcomes that companies are looking for? Do they know the challenges of today? Do they have an idea what needs to be done, who’s going to do it, and how much time and money is involved in realizing intended benefits?

Most companies don’t.

That is why we created about 100+ questions that can be used to assess the As-is situation as well as questions to assess MSI- competence, and skill-level. If interested, click here until further notice and you will get the latest status.

Innovation in Construction

After that, it was about time for the Smart World Partner consultancy that Winniio offers in their Smart World Partner program. One of the largest construction companies in the US is currently taking huge strides in becoming the new Apple in the Construction space. Topics of discussion were:

• How to scope down and solve interoperability and communication issues out on-site between people
• How to get most of the benefits out working with engineering consultants
• Division 25 specifications and knowing where offerings start and stop
• Insurance claims, what they could look like and how to avoid them through connectivity strategies and phone home solutions
• Contractual de-risking and how owners representatives can improve planning and move further into operations
• What is actually needed from a construction company’s standpoint to deliver value and have more control and clout during the whole construction lifecycle?
• Pros and cons with Primavera, Microsoft Project, and other “tools of the trade”
• The importance of Mission and Vision to drive change through the organization
• Pinpointing external drivers, internal change agents and automation centers for continuous growth without throwing more people on the problem.

Where to start?

Sinclair:   Hi Nicolas, great to talk to you.  I hope you had a great time in Helsinki. I have been in the business now for ages, but I am curious to hear what you think. You are 2.5 years in, what is your take on this amazing industry that is Building Automation?

Waern:  I had a great time in Helsinki, and I can honestly day that it feels like a long way since I started in this industry. It’s fascinating that it is such a world of its own!  If I talk about Smarter Buildings, BACnet, to anyone outside Building Automation, no one has a clue. That might not be the case in the US, but this is definitely the case here in the Nordics and especially in Sweden. And even if I talk to people who are in the business here in the Nordics, some people still put and equal sign between Modbus and BACnet thinking they are the same. Which is as far from the truth as possible, and that is why I always have a BACnet tutorial ready, in case someone wants to (needs to) know more.

Going back to the question, I do believe that it is an amazing industry to be in. What I saw early on, 2.5 years ago, when I first was introduced to the concept of BAS, was that it was ripe for disruption and that building automation as a whole, has a glorious future ahead.

Sinclair:   What do you mean?

Waern: If you look at smartphones, they all have an app store, right? And if you look at connected vehicles, they too are starting to become less hardware and more software where the focus is on building a platform and opening up an eco-system.  Volvo are now utilizing the Android Platform to build great solutions on top of it. Why re-invent the wheel?.

You can’t do everything on your own. And even if you can, you shouldn’t.  The business is being disrupted slowly but surely and IoT companies are coming in to further reduce annual operating costs, resulting in a significant increase in net operating income and a strong boost to property value as Daphne Thomlinson writes here

It seems to me that the industry has been dominated by a few big ones, no one in the middle, and then there’s a lot of smaller companies working in silos. I believe that the future lies in anything but proprietary. What other industries have done is that they have had to evolve in order to support the creation of open, modular, secure solutions where you allow others to create robust, useful and attractive offerings in an easy way. That’s where the building automation industry is heading, albeit slow. Of course, Wework and similar companies are making ripples all over the world but I don’t think everyone is aware of the platform economy that’s going to come.

Sinclair:   How do you think we can move faster together? What needs to be done to get to this open eco-system?

Waern: Well, as you have pointed out with #RUIOTREADY I think that we all have to think short and hard if we are ready? And if we are not, why not? And if we are, what are we ready for?

And I think that when you say “move faster together,” that the together part is very important here. I see it for our solutions that in order to think outside the box, we first have to be better at defining the box. Sticking to your knitting, whilst pursuing collaboration is the key moving forward. This is a new field. That is why we collaborate with experts in various fields, such as iioote where they help us to collect data from LPWAN technologies, because that’s not what we should do.

But, as someone told me the other day;

“No one will touch it if it doesn’t break. And even if it does break, no one will touch it if it isn’t critical!”

I am not sure if this is 100% true or not, but I can definitely see that it has some relevance. If IoT, or anything else that is deemed novel, isn’t solving an immediate need, why bother? And that is why it’s equally refreshing to read what Scott Cochrane says about the work that is being done by system integrators here;

“…not only accomplishing huge value on these projects within typical budgets, they are actually saving the entire project and life cycle of the building huge amounts of money.”

I think there are mainly two things that need to be done in order to move faster together:

1. Companies have to be much better in narrowing down their offerings, proposing concrete, simple solutions that fill a need for their intended customer. Sharing the risk in the beginning to create some solid use cases and focus on the MUST HAVE’s, not the Nice to have’s.
2. We need champions of change and solid use cases that are generic, scalable and applicable to the BAS industry and its stakeholders. We need to hear more about the wireless solutions that work. We recently did some interesting work with powerline communication to AHUs on the roof, EnOcean lighting control, using BACnet/WS to easily and securely connect to 3rd party applications all underneath the BACnet umbrella. We need more focus on open and modular hardware software solutions making work easier for everyone in the business and also people on the “outside” coming in.

Sinclair:   Making it easier for others to make sound decisions, sharing the risk sounds about right. And where do you think companies should start?

Waern: This is a question that has interested me since the start. The industry is moving closer to the edge as you have written yourself and it is clear that most of the value will be derived from the edge and through modular IoT Edge Gateways.  We agree with you and Marc Petock and probably thousands of others that this will disrupt the industry providing a quantum leap in capabilities, connection, control and apparent simplification of everything as well as Powering the Edge to the Enterprise.

The recent figure from Worldwide Embedded and Intelligent Systems Forecast stating that IoT gateways and IoT edge devices will represent the largest business opportunity in IoT. From 16B devices to 60B going from $15B revenue to $24B in revenue. And our focus area, IoT Edge Gateways representing the highest annual growth rate going from $784M to $1.3B revenue until 2022. This made me smile from ear to ear when I saw it at a networking event from Ericsson. We are in a perfect place for the future and if you haven’t started already, you should definitely be thinking of living on the edge.

We have some serious competition, but our approach of having open and modular software and hardware solutions is starting to get global attention. And we believe the future is in the open and modular space doing more with less. Shameless plug of course.

But the real reason why I have been asking this myself on where to start is obvious. Why does it sometimes seem like nothing is happening in this industry if we compare it to other industries?

At the edge is the future, but where to start? I wrote an article a couple of months ago as a response to Tyson Soutters’s great article here about the very subject on where to start with Smart Buildings.

Smart Buildings, where to begin?

He argues that no one gets it and that “they focus on the fruits of the tree (smart outputs) rather than the roots (the underlying data infrastructure).”

And that if you plant great roots, the juices will flow eventually.

True. But how long does it take to plant a tree and then wait for the juices to flow? For someone who doesn’t love BAS the way your readers do, probably too long. I argue that gimmicky might be gold in the way that it will lead to quicker wins and a buy in from the organization. Which will lead to a much softer approach, true, but hopefully also faster towards humanistic digital inclusion.

I mean, nowadays, anyone who says BACnet, I smile, and I can engage in conversation for hours. But for “those darn pesky people in our buildings” as you have written before, maybe the gimmicky and gold is where to start? After all most buildings are still uncomfortable to live and work in.  Strategy is important, no doubt about it. And it probably comes down to the universal truth of “it depends.” But I do think that it needs to be a bit of both in order to better get the user buy-in that is needed to get a momentum going.

Sinclair:   Okay, gimmicky is gold.. I rather like that! And if you would choose three things to start with, what would they be?

Waern: Fantastic question. This is something that we have been thinking of a lot on our own and in brainstorming sessions with our customers. Our primary customers are mostly system integrators. No doubt about it. In the discussions with them, we hear that we are “the JACE-Killer” in that we do things faster, somewhat cheaper, and in an open and modular way. These customers almost always go for the number one thing, which is getting data out of the building and making trend logging easier. Maybe it’s because we are experts at it, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy? But as Kelly Reiser at Smarter Buildings LLC puts it;

“The real value of trend logging is that it is crucial to any application of advanced analytics, M&V, continuous commissioning and AI of most types.”

Therefore, referring to both what I answered earlier, about trying to make it simple, as well as referring to Gordon’s Kitchen nightmares and also Ruari Barnwell’s article here, I have composed a three course menu;

1. Automated trend logging from the building. Getting all of those BACnet objects out of every controller on site, remotely of course, and making sure you implement the latest tagging as far as the standard allows, and get that data to some database somewhere. Our customers are starting to see great results turning days of work into hours. All you need is our modular hardware and software edge controller, The DINGO. 
2. Analytics and push back commands to the building. You have gotten historical data as well as continuous data from the building, and now it’s time to push back some commands and control to the BAS system. There are several ways of doing this in a bi-directional way. We have a BACnet/MQTT recipe for IBM Watson, as well as the possibility of a RESTful API if that is needed. We are also working on an XMPP gateway in order to track changes down the line for a customer. But, the simplest, fastest and most direct way is through BACnet/WS. What most people don’t know is that you lose core functionality with MQTT and other protocols, and why not stick to BACnet all the way? In our eyes, it’s even better than a double rainbow! So, creating a bi-directional gateway harmonizing data from any LPWAN technology, creating your own analytics platform or partner up with others to  No doubt about it. What most people don’t know is that you lose core functionality with MQTT and other protocols, and why not stick to BACnet all the way? In our eyes, it’s even better than a double rainbow! So, creating a bi-directional gateway with the ability to develop your own, or partner up with others to create autonomous actions on the intelligent edge would be the next step that we can take today.
3. Making it easier to connect “outside” applications to the BAS/BACnet World. You have started to create the onset of a much smarter building with feedback loops and the potential of continuous improvement.

Could this be in the form of “edge-bots” in order to “analyse quickly, while it still matters”? 

Sinclair:   Very interesting Nicolas, and this seems like a good approach into getting smarter buildings. To summarize, what are the most important facets of a building that we need to think about? Where is the future?

Waern: The why aspect shouldn’t be neglected. By 2025 buildings will be the number one consumer of energy worldwide, overtaking transportation and we do spend 90% of our time indoors. Real estate has to move towards a platform-economy more and more move as Daphne Tomlinsson stated in the beginning. Security will be one of the most important topics that we need to address more as Bob Sharon from Blue Iot in Australia addresses here.

Trust and openness are extremely important moving forwards but the fundamentals for me when it comes to buildings, and solutions for buildings, lie in the famous three Vitruvian virtues, Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas.

It originates from architecture and it means that a building must be robust, useful and attractive for its user(s). I think this holds true for any product in any industry but of course even more so when it comes to buildings.

A building needs to be both useful and robust, but the emotions it will evoke in a person will matter even more in the future. And this holds true to the very solutions that are being used in order to make buildings into the “Smarter Buildings” we are looking for.

We have seen it with the NEST, in that making something beautiful and attractive will make it win more ground. We have seen it with Apple products. And we will see it even more with all products going into a building and even more so with ones which end users connect to. Demand-controlled ventilation is one where more focus is placed on creating a dynamic experience for the users, and I know that SWEGON here in Sweden are doing great things in this area, proving that wireless = reliable using mesh technology from Lumen Radio.

Changing the way we think about buildings, making them more attractive and useful, focusing more on the well-being aspects, that’s where I want to see more things happening. Urbanisation is a global mega trend and more focus has to be put on the well-being and productivity aspects.

But at the same time, doing this at scale, in robust and useful ways, requires roots that are firm and strategically placed in order to get the juiciest fruit in the long run. Wireless is by no means the answer to everything. But it is growing and it will take a bigger place moving forwards. And that is why this industry is so fun to be in. It always depends and there’s no silver bullet.

I am still fascinated by the fact that Building Automation is in a world of its own. It needs to come together with the rest of the world and I do believe we all have to work together more from a Smart City Context in order to make buildings aware of what they really need to be aware of.

Sure, companies have stated that we are the “JACE-killer” but that’s almost opposite what we see ourselves as. We are an open and modular hardware and software alternative and a complementary product to other powerful solutions out there. Yes, we make it simpler to connect the building to anything on the outside, and for anything on the outside to be connected buildings in a seamless way. But it is together we’ll make this industry move forward and great things are happening, that’s a fact.

I haven’t even begun to list the things that I see possible with VR/5G/Machine Learning/AI/RPA/BIM/Digital Twins/SECURITY – on the edge, or in the cloud, IoT in general or any other thing that fills my mind on a daily basis.

All the technology is here. It is just us people that need to start implementing. With that said, what are you waiting for? Go out there and start! And if you ever need help in making your buildings talk to people, just let us know.

“Making Buildings Aware of What They Need To Be Aware Of”

Picture 1. Connecting Worlds. High-level overview of our place in the Building Automation Market.

Directly after my last email interview, Ken Sinclair asked me a couple of questions regarding our product line. It was apparent that my rant about making buildings talk to people didn’t really explain all that we are doing. I will try to remedy this when discussing my perspective on open hardware and open software. As well as building, building bots, and what that might entail for the future.

Ken’s behind the scenes questions

Ken: “It looks like dingo is an alternate to raspberry does it run open Sedona?”

Raspberry Pi
Yes, the DINGO edge gateway is extremely modular, and as such we have a couple of alternatives for Compute boards. We have the Raspberry PI Com1 compute module as well as the newer version which is, the more Powerful Com3 Compute Module. Both are industrial grade components, and the DINGO cannot be compared with the hobby RPi boards you can buy at any DIY store. It can, but it would be like comparing a kickbike to a Range Rover. Both are fun to drive, but you know that only one of them will take you through any terrain in a secure, fast and robust way.

Sedona killer
Yes, we definitely support Sedona and we see some uptake in North America in regard to using it with our DINGO. It lowers the barrier of usage. However, there’s no doubt in our minds at least, that the true Sedona killer is definitely called Node-RED.  We are huge fans of Node-RED which you can see here.

The thing with Node-RED is that it supports the cloud part and cloud thinking 100%. Sedona not as much. But we want to stay open and offer choices for our customers, and the more the better.

Ken: “Dingo Builds heavy on open software but is it an open hardware platform?”

Open Hardware (and Software)

We are modular in terms of both hardware and software. We are soon up and running with a global hardware manufacturer and distributor which will ensure global scale up for real!

Picture 2. Naked and a fully dressed DINGO with modules – Modular hardware solutions for the horizontal IoT Market

We enable anyone to build their own Edge-gateway, and we are selling dozens of Dingos each month, focusing on ramping up for next year with our global product launch at this year’s Electronica in Munich, Europe. Our definition of an open hardware platform is that everything is based on modules which can be put together in any which way possible.

And this is exactly what I would like to talk about in this issue.

Open Hardware, Open Software, and Building Bots

These are very interesting topics, and I think they are very much aligned. At least, they need to be much more moving forwards. As everyone knows, a lot of the solutions out there are still proprietary. This is unfortunate since we need to get innovations going in and around the building automation industry. Not just for the fun of it, but because buildings represent 40% of the World’s energy consumption and also because we spend 90% of our time indoors. We need to open up the space and let others come in with innovative solutions in a much easier way in order to create better buildings faster.

Latest research clearly shows the negative effects air pollution have on people. That, for me, is one of the most important reasons why we have to act quickly. By opening up the industry for people to take advantage of “other” solutions, outside the Building automation industry, I think we’ll see a great deal of interdisciplinary innovations we haven’t even thought of. Mixing and matching from different vendors, also allowing anyone to write apps in whatever language they want, is definitely where we need to get to. We are doing some of this right now, where we take in data from any IOT-solution and converting them into Virtual BACnet objects. It could be sensor data in the building, outside the building or halfway around the earth.

Picture 3. Converting any “IoT” data to the any BAS, making them Go-IoT Ready

LEGO Building Blocks

What might be needed is a new way to do things and for everything to be more modular. And what is more modular than LEGO?

The LEGO reference to the building automation industry is quite fitting in a way. It has been dominated by a few global giants, offering great solutions but within their own proprietary setting. New companies have formed creating universal solutions which allow these building blocks to better communicate with each other and for total solutions to be made.

However, the major difference to that of LEGO is that these companies have glued things together, creating additional proprietary solutions on top of other proprietary solutions. Sure, these have been made fit for purpose, but the glue won’t come off that easily, if ever. And that’s the challenge. The world is changing in a much faster pace than ever and there is a shortage of skilled labour. We need to do things better, faster, and to do more with less.

I am not saying that edge controllers, or any backbone technology will shift as fast as we change mobile phones. But what I am saying is that solutions must have a much greater ability for modularity moving forwards. It needs to be easier to transform existing buildings into buildings that are robust, useful and attractive for its users. The basic building blocks should not change every so often, but the ecosystem it enables, needs to have the ability to quickly absorb or export data in a standardized way.

Will BACnet become the umbrella for everything IoT and buildings?

I think so. And this will allow everyone in the building automation industry to have access to all of the wonderful lego-pieces that are out there. And it also enables everyone without building automation industry knowledge to add pieces to an existing backbone that is enabled by open hardware and open software wrapped underneath a BACnet umbrella.

“An App store for buildings.”

We are not the only ones with this line of thinking, and some have already started. But I definitely believe more and more that an app store for buildings (probably several) will pop up as time goes by. This will enable not only industry professionals to create better solutions 100% tailored for their customers. But also, real estate owners, inviting others in to innovate with their buildings. And possibly even better, ordinary people, living in buildings, that have 1st hand knowledge of the problem, to create solutions for the building and for other users creating a hotbed of innovation easily transferrable to other buildings, having black boxed everything underneath a BACnet umbrella.

Building Bots and invisible technology

BBB, Building building bots, will definitely be interesting moving forwards and who knows which road it will take. I always say to everyone that technology shouldn’t even be visible. Some say that children of the future will talk to their buildings and expect for the building to talk back.

I have also heard that in modern buildings you would tell the building that you would like to have 22 degrees in whatever space you are in, and it will make it so.

Both of these assumptions fall short of what I think will happen. The thing is, technology should be an enabler to make us more human. And perhaps, we need to make technology more human as well. So the next step would be… what? Saying that you are cold and the building understands your desired temperature based on your personal settings?

No. Even better. The great late 90’s prophet, Ronan Keating, said it best.

“It’s amazing how you can speak right to my heart. Without saying a word you can light up the dark”… “ You say it best when you say nothing at all.”

What I mean by this is that you won’t say “turn down the temperature by 2 degrees.”
You won’t say you are cold and the building knows what you want.

Absolutely not. Technology will never be visible to the user;

“The creation of intelligence is hidden away in the engine room, always there and always on, but never visible to the user.” Ken Sinclair

The building, and everything around you, will know that we have been to the gym, it will know that we are tired because a camera can detect it and compare it with our heart rate, our blood pressure, sugar levels, etc, etc. And it has already prepared a succulent meal together with the robot chef powered by IBM Watson. The building will know how we feel, what our needs are, much faster than we would be able to tell it what to do. If anything, the building might want to give us some examples based on what it knows we want. But from our perspective, the interaction would be very sporadic at best.

Internet of things moving towards an Internet of People

IoT, Internet of Things, will slowly but surely turn into an IoP, Internet of People. I didn’t coin this phrase but actually a Building Information Modeling expert at Zynka BIM. They specialize in digitalizing the built environment with stellar looking BIM renderings and together we are in discussions to create true digital twins. Daniel Månsson showed me a rendering where they had connected it with beacons, and they could track people in real time, showing it in a digital twin. Getting data based on the movements of the people will be the future for sure.

“The biggest building bots will be us, humans.”

We are getting more connected, and we will create cognitive buildings, and the building(s) will learn from its user and adapt accordingly. The example above might have been for home automation, but it’s definitely something that will happen in large commercial buildings as well, and we’ll see true Smart City Ecosystems soon enough.

What needs to be done and what will happen?

Well, as I see it, we need to democratize the way we innovate with buildings and that can only happen through open hardware and software and better tools to easily configure logic at the edge/in the fog and on cloud level. Will this demand open source or just open, in terms of API’s? Talk of the town is that open source might not be secure or reliable enough. “What about Linus Torvalds” – is usually the follow up to that one. So, there will most likely be both. API’s however only acts as the tongue and I would argue that BACnet, with its 60% World domination, will continue to be even more important moving forward. Otherwise, we’ll risk getting stuck in API-Hell.

And by opening up the industry from both sides, building automation to the world, and the world to building automation, we’ll see a lot of great things happening. Creating building bots in terms of Edgebots will definitely be important for the future, and this will be so much easier moving forward. These bots will continuously collect data from users, through cameras, social media posts, user data given away freely, and we are not far away from the Mall Scene scenario from Minority Report. These will definitely help bring about change, but as I argued before, they will emerge like fireflies, and they will eventually die pretty fast as well.

Make Humans great again!

What is the real goal of building automation really? Aren’t we missing the whole point? Technology should enable us to enjoy more of life. However, that is rarely the case. If we employ technology as it was intended, and if we will see huge time-savings. Will these time savings go to enjoying more of life, or actually working the same hours as before, perhaps even more? That might be for another column, and it’s soon 2.40AM here. I wish I had a couple of edge bots right now in my home. Not sure what they would do, but I am sure that my life would be much better!

Final Words

Open hardware and open software is definitely the key moving forward. We’ll be talking about this in January in Atlanta under the topic “Next Generation HVAC Controls: Open Hardware – Open Software.” Not sure if we will include Building Edge bots in the conversation but the advent of new and innovative solutions is the outcome when interdisciplinary fields are allowed to meet. Creating better buildings has never been as important, or as easy as it is right now. And as I said last month as well, the technology is here, just go out there and start something!

Taking buildings to the cloud, connected buildings, advanced analytics, machine learning, Internet of things… How do we get value out of buildings in the best way possible that is also future proof? Is there such a way?

The Handshake-Problem with the API-economy

It doesn’t have to be complicated, so I will try to simplify things, starting with the API-economy. There’s a lot of data in buildings, and there’s a lot of opportunities to make sense of the data, do analytics on it and to create new services for people working with buildings. To get the data out usually you must have an interface, an API of sorts. Making buildings talk to people is, after all, the one thing that I try to help out with.

An API is basically like defined handshake. I have my defined handshake, you might have yours, and if we were to shake hands, we’d face a couple of different options which are described here. The definition of an API is an Application Programming Interface. Simply put, it is a defined handshake which will make the process of making handshakes into something that will at least be easier than without a defined API. But it won’t solve everything, far from it. It might make things worse in the long run. Not necessarily, but it might.

Let’s go through a couple of scenarios.

We don’t have any defined APIs

If we don’t have any defined APIs, it will be difficult for us to shake hands because we don’t even know how we could shake hands. And if someone else wanted us to shake hands, they would have a really hard time figuring out how we could shake hands because they might not have a good idea to what languages we are talking or if we even want to shake hands.

The first step would be to get APIs = the possibility to shake hands in a defined way and not lock in the data, hoping that will make us irreplaceable.

We have an APIs, but they are not the same

We now have our own handshakes, but they are not the same. Who wants to initiate the handshake? Let’s say that one side wants to shake hands; then they will have to figure out how to do it. They can change their handshake to fit the other one’s handshake or also create something in between where the handshaking will take place. This might be anything but simple or difficult, but it adds complexity, and it will take time.

Let’s say you walk into a room with 20 different APIs. 20 people with different handshakes, and for every person you need to figure out what is in their handshake and how you should approach it. That will take time, effort and as we’ll describe later, it will only be 1% of the effort needed in getting to the complete solution.

We have an APIs, and they are the same

We now have our own handshakes, and they have been defined in the same way as our counterpart. We can now rest assured that things will be easier moving forward. However, the handshake is only the first part. It doesn’t mean that we speak the same languages. It doesn’t mean that we have the same values. It doesn’t really say much of how we can talk to each other, the effort it takes to talk to each other and also what language we should use in talking to each other.

Imagine this at scale.

We are in the same room. We all want to talk to each other, but we have different definitions of the same things. Or we have different definitions of different things. We speak in different languages. And everything about what we do, how we do it, is totally different. We come from different worlds, but somehow, someone came up with the idea that we are going to act like one just because we share the same definition of a handshake. And someone else out there expects that it is the outcome of us working together that is the amazing thing.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Basically, this is a cultural question which relates to us people as well. Consider a merger between two companies where the culture is different even though everything else stays the same. This will be problematic and as we all know Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

It is not far-fetched to compare the definition of culture and values to that of semantic interoperability between systems considering that definition of culture is:

“The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.”

also:

“the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time.”

And semantic interoperability:

“Semantic interoperability is the ability of computer systems to exchange data with unambiguous, shared meaning. Semantic interoperability is a requirement to enable computable machine logic, inferencing, knowledge discovery, and data federation between information systems.”

Semantic interoperability leaves little to no doubt as to what is inferred. Whereas cultural norms and values would be more open to interpretation. However, both play the vital role of acting as a mediator between two or more otherwise interoperable areas what could be important boundary spanning elements and possible definitions of a subset of the ANT-theory by Bruno Latour.

And as such, an important piece when trying to make different things come together to make things happen in a better, future-proof way.

A shared set of values is the key

A handshake is nothing but a handshake. It is what comes after which is the most important and exciting part. Thinking that the outcome of the merger will lead to amazing results just because you shake hands with the other company is exactly the same thing that is happening right now out there in the world of IoT. It won’t really bode well.

“According to McKinsey research, only 16% of merger reorgs fully deliver their objectives in the planned time, 41% take longer than expected, and in 10% of cases, the reorg actually harms the newly-formed organization.” – HBR

A merger is after all a clash of two systems with their own set of standardized definitions and ways of working. Just making them shake hands won’t make them work. Far from it.

“…You will have to choose one structure that integrates the two companies.”

Replace companies with systems, and the two companies mentioned might not be two companies but a merger of 10 companies, i.e., Systems.

If I say tree, what do you think of?
I think about a Christmas tree.
And when I say Christmas tree, what do you think about?

•    What is the size?
•    What is the location?
•    Does it have a star at the top?
•    What’s the color of the star?
•    The material of the star?

It doesn’t say anything else about anything really because we haven’t got shared definitions and boxes of what should be included about what a tree is. It is partly to define the size of the boxes and what they are and a part where we can standardize a subset of an industry with the same tagging conventions/standards.

I could write 30 more pages on this matter but let’s move on to the final remarks…

Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning needs more than a handshake

The truth is that most of the analytics efforts out there today are spent on 80-90% cleaning of data. And 10-20% on the part where the value gets derived. So, this is an immediate problem that needs to be solved to leverage existing data with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This is crucial for us to really make sense of the data and to achieve results never before possible.

The problem within the building automation sphere is not that big in comparison to other fields. And why is that?

The solution to all of these problems

As discussed, APIs are a good start but don’t get fooled in thinking that the API economy is the end of all of our problems. As discussed over and over again (It’s important!) it might actually be the exact opposite and the beginning of a whole new set of problems as depicted above. 

The answer lies in standardized protocols which can harmonize data from different vendors, acting as a device to device communication protocol.

Semantic interoperability, and how to solve this issue will be of major importance moving forward. Consider it as the rule book when having made a merger and how everyone should work.

It is here Haystack tagging comes in, and where BACnet will play a major role moving forward and as we have said before, BACnet might be renamed to BACnet/IoT soon enough!

BACnet is the standardized bowl filled with pockets to fill with an industry-specific standard and IoT solutions. But the bowl and the BACnet objects within the protocol is what is needed, and luckily we seem to be well on our way in realizing this for the betterment of all buildings and cities out there. The problem is not that big within the building automation sphere, yet. But with the advent of unstructured data coming in from the sides, we are bound to have a lot of challenges moving forward.

Because BACnet and upcoming addendums solve that pretty well, providing a standardized platform for others to build on.

Final words – Focusing on the outcomes

For others to build on, that is the important part.

Using BACnet as the protocol layer for everything is, in my opinion, the key in transforming data to information when making both buildings and cities “Go-IoT” and Cloud ready.

Connor McCloud might be angry at me for writing this, but there won’t be the only one solution out there. And that is how it should be. There won’t be one solution to rule them all, and what we should strive for is open standards, service transparency and the creation of true Digital Twins for the betterment of others. I might think that BACnet is the solutions to rule them all, but it is the outcome we all should collaborate towards. I’m in it to create a better world for everyone with smarter, more energy efficient buildings. Fewer costs and headache for maintenance and above all, better indoor climate, personalized experiences for tenants and users of buildings worldwide.

In order to make buildings talk to people, we need to understand what they are saying. And luckily, we are well on our way!

Nicolas Waern
The Building Whisperer