Cushman & Wakefield

What is the role of the CIO in this conversation?

Independent Data Layers

Interoperability – something taken for granted in IT networks but lacking in Smart Building

If you came here looking for the answer to what is a Smart Building, I apologize, but I am going to let you down.

I don’t think there is anything that can be called a Smart Building. In reality, it is more an answer to the question, did you use technology intelligently? Similar to how our business or processes create a lot of data, our built environment also does. Instead of creating more data, you can tap what you already have to save money, reduce your environmental impact, and improve people’s experience in your spaces.

So what is your role in this? I want to focus on two things. One is providing a safe place for these Smart Building or Operational Technology platforms to exist. The second one is a technology agnostic resource to provide the infrastructure that can benefit multiple organizations within your company. When sourcing laptops, ideally, you are considering the needs of your HR, Marketing, Programming, Industrial, Warehouse, and Field teams, right? Operational technology is often looked at through a single lens, but the values the CIO and your organization can bring are helping understand how it can impact multiple business units.

Looking at the first piece. You have to pardon my peers in the Commercial Real Estate technology space. While they have been able to deliver some interesting automation and advancements in our built environment, they are super slow to adopt new standards and operating systems. I promise that in at least one of your buildings is a workstation that is running Windows XP. If not running, your building engineer would have a very bad day trying to keep the lights on. Why is this? Well, the software running the building automation system wasn’t updated since 2012, and the controllers that are connected to it are not compatible with the newer version of the platform, so to replace the Windows XP device, you have to replace all the controllers connected to it. This could be a 6 or 7-figure project. Windows stopped making security patches in 2014. The building automation system was designed to run for 15-20 years. Can you name one IT product with that intended life span since the rotary dial phone was retired?

Most IT departments put requirements on OT platforms to enable patches or deploy updates that are not considered viable in that space. The industry is catching up and realizing the need/ value, but it will take time. Remember that the life cycle is 15- 20 years, not 15-20 months, like many other components. So, in my opinion, it is the role of the CIO to understand the history of these systems along with their limitations, life cycles, ROIs, etc., and design network standards/infrastructure to support and protect these components from people with malicious intent. The old BAS computer might not be able to be patched, but I promise that the IT network it sits on can be designed to monitor its communications and isolate it if it should be compromised. The alternative is for vendors and facility management to create shadow networks separate from corporate IT. This is where vulnerabilities come into play. Help ensure policies are in place to be able to say yes, so while these systems are not ideal, they are still in a managed environment. We do not update building controllers at the pace we do iPhones. It is way cheaper to protect those systems rather than force updates or deal with outcomes from saying no.

​ Instead of creating more data, you can tap what you already have to save money, reduce your environmental impact, and improve people’s experience in your spaces 

The second piece is Switzerland. Data exists across your facilities and business units that can be leveraged by facilities teams, corporate real estate, HR, and many others to deliver a host of use cases. Often, these data sources are funded by one group but can benefit others. Basically the concept there is looking at your systems and realizing the value added of normalizing data to enable the consumption of that data by a variety of applications. To start, we can simply look at occupancy. There are a variety of sources of this information, the first one is badge data. Everyone that enters your facility swipes their badge. We have a pretty good count of how many people are in the building. We are not sure if they leave based on traditional exit procedures, but we get an idea of how many people showed up. This can be used, if enabled, by a variety of business units. Facilities can use this to help compare energy usage to occupancy to know if they are being more efficient or not, normalized by the number of people.

Corporate Real Estate can use this for forecasting and leasing negotiations. Your facility also likely has security cameras. Analytics on these video feeds can likely tell people coming and going or where people are roughly in your campus. Again, this can add a level of accuracy that the badge data doesn’t have. A simple roll for the CIO is recognizing the value in enabling access to this information, configuring security around it, and appropriately covering costs like we would other common applications. By doing so, it can avoid deploying additional systems to your facilities that add cost and more exposure points from a security concern.

The easiest way to a Smart Building, if such a thing existed, is the Independent Data Layer. This is no different than an Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) that is being offered to connect applications. In reality I am currently debating if these solutions are different or the same. The IDL is a solution that has a data model and can bring data in from edge infrastructure within your facilities, normalize it, and associate it to the data model so it can be ingested by applications that can deliver use cases from the data. The applications can also publish data back to the IDL for use by the edge infrastructure. This is the correct way of deploying IoT and applications that deliver the use cases. However the ROI is tied to the application, not the data aggregation. Currently, there is never an ROI on putting data into an IDL. Using an IDL is not going to deliver energy savings. What it can do is that by enabling an application to consume occupancy data regardless of the source, a company can use a single application across the entirety of a platform using a single integration rather than a dozen integrations. If at some point the edge infrastructure or application changes a new point to point integration would have to be completed. Suppose your company moves into a new geography and the standard lighting control vendor is different than the US. In that case, you can easily use them, because their data can integrate to the IDL and look the same as the US vendor to the application. Also, if you come across a new application with the coolest use case of occupancy data you have ever seen, all they have to do is pull data from your IDL which is already normalized

and tagged to locations. Their integration is easy and they only have to do it once rather than for each system deployed in the portfolio. You can imagine the time and cost savings there. The ROI for the IDL isn’t in the outcome, but the expectation that the data can be leveraged by multiple use cases and application. Instead of a web of integrations, you create a hub and spoke model.

We have all become accustomed to the concept of interoperability with our IT hardware. I expect that if I buy a camera off Amazon, when I plug it into my work laptop, the camera will identify it and the OS on my computer will download the right driver. At that point, the camera can share information collected with the computer OS. I have several applications on my computer that can leverage camera data. Teams, WebEx, Zoom, Camera, and more. I can take cameras from 100s of vendors, plug it in, and it can share data with applications from 100s of vendors. This is normal or commonplace in the environment for which I am writing this article, but completely foreign to most systems that operate your buildings, grant access to them, or help you get from floor to floor. Imagine that if I wanted to use Teams, I would have to use the camera and microphone they provided as part of a SaaS? Oh wait, the client wants to use Zoom? That would be another camera, microphone, and SaaS fee. Our people would have 6+ devices to work day to day. Sounds absurd, right? This is the world our OT lives in. Often the vendor selling me an air quality sensor wants to sell me vizualizations, dashboards, and service. So these systems “need” to communicate with their platforms. However, I already have a great BI platform, I don’t need theirs. That’s fine, if I pay for theirs I can get the data from an API to go into mine. Wait what?

Similarly, that $2mil Building Automation system your GC installed in your new HQ will not want to enable data to other platforms. They want to use that data and their “ownership” to add use cases or value to the services they offer you. They would rather sell you their Space Utilization software than enable the occupancy data to easily flow to whatever application you already use in other buildings. How can CIOs and their organizations help here? Time and time again, I will see owners/occupiers of real estate stand on a stage and say they are agnostic to who provides or consumes a data point as long as they get the data point. The second that person walks off the stage, if someone can deliver them the easy button of creating and consuming that data point with a single contract and throat to choke, they will press the button every time. It is important for the CIO and their organization to understand the true costs of the easy button and change the procurement processes to reward organizations supporting interoperability. Without the end user or consumer changing their buying habits, it will be hard to convert the vendors. This really comes down to budgets, if facilities is procuring something that can benefit workplace, enable it to be procured as a common tool or application.

At the end of the day, the CIO needs to work with the facilities team to create a reliable and secure environment to help buildings run efficiently and provide great experiences of the people in them. Our facility engineers are not going to grasp how to configure managed switches to protect networks in the same manner our network engineers won’t understand how to tweak pump speeds to balance a primary/ secondary chilled water loop. If they exist, Smart Buildings are the outcome of the CIO and Facility Management team working together with other business units to deliver various outcomes of a common data set.