August 7, 2015 - Building Automation
By Ken Sinclair
Transformational change is the process of altering the basic elements of an organization's culture, including the norms, values, and assumptions under which the organization functions.
Getting some great comments directly, off the record and in articles / comments in our August issue about the "Transformational Change" that is happening to allow the Map of the Possible.
Paul Ehrlich our contributing editor provides this wisdom that started our August theme: As you are aware we have already written roadmaps for intelligent buildings. No harm in doing this again — but is this what we really need? Or perhaps it is something else — like a transformative change in how the industry is structured?
The bottom line to date is: "The possible is presently impossible without transformative change, but the map of the possible is leading rapidly to help define the needs of that transformative change that is now required everywhere in our industry."
Transformative change is happening everywhere, but just not fast enough for our clients and, yes, even ourselves. If we do not lead the change someone else will, and our industry will suffer the consequences of that.
I am pleased that spurred on by my attempts to build a map of the possible that we have several great articles on extending the possible and how we all can lead "Transformational Change." Please feel free to join in with comments and or articles and interviews to share your opinions.
I have provided my review/summary of articles in this issue that speak to "Transformational Change."
The blizzard of comments below are extracted from several articles that captured the transformative change now occurring in our industry:
We are grateful that Ken has kicked off the discussion of "Roadmap of the Possible" and is inviting industry stakeholders to contribute to the dialogue. Connected buildings are becoming and will continue to become a reflection on today’s information technology (IT) and today’s societal trends which include mobility, social media, big data and personalization. Today’s IT has been inserted into our buildings through networked controls systems, sophisticated sensors and big data analytics.
With this month’s theme being about transformative change, what is driving transformative change in our industry? Transformative change is powerful. It can have a real impact by changing how products are made and distributed, how products are serviced and refined and more.
Several big players have made moves to become more involved in intelligent buildings and building automation, either by way of acquisitions or strategic partnerships. They realize that from this base the Building Internet of Things (BIoT) can rapidly expand; and within 10 years theoretically triple the size of the business.
Where will this information come from? In many cases it will come from the numerous systems that building owners, operators, and occupants already have within their facilities. Building owners, operators, and occupants will not throw out their existing systems just to participate in the Smart Grid. Rather, existing systems and the protocols that they use will adapt and contribute towards the facility’s Smart Grid-related goals.
Measuring Happiness; It’s notoriously hard to measure comfort and productivity. People have done awesome work in this area, but the reality is that productivity means different things to different people, especially for knowledge workers like many people who work in creative fields, technology fields, etc. And yet, we all know that where we work matters.
A single, integrated engineering team should collaborate on all software programming and optimization tasks - controls, analytics, and workflow management - during design and construction. The resulting data platform can evolve into a building energy management system that will serve the building’s on-going commissioning needs through its useful life.
We don’t need to manually map all the controls points from the building automation system (BAS) into the automated FDD software system. Standard naming means much of this work can be accomplished quickly, in batch.
Has support for standardization efforts like BACnet and Project Haystack naming/tagging taxonomy grown to the point that it is providing a pathway for data-driven building operations technologies across the chasm?
You have a lot of interesting reading ahead to catch up on today's "Transformational Change."
