“Buildings are not bonds… The key difference that I think a huge amount of the real estate industry does not appreciate is that a building is a product that people have to use. So it is a fixed income asset, but it is also a product that people need to be in, you know, for you to make money as an owner. And that is really, really evident right now.”
–Aaron Lapsley  

• Aaron walks us through his unique resume in the energy and buildings space (2:21)
• The need/gap System2 filled (6:37)
• Most detailed answer yet to James’ favorite question - Buildings are not bonds, and six factors limiting innovation (8:53)
• Aaron’s experience with Cushman, supporting Google (31:16)
• Smart Building Strategy (37:55)
• RESET and IAQ (50:25)
• What Aaron is looking forward to in 2021 (1:00:26)

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“I was very quickly disappointed once I realized there was a huge gap between the promise and the reality of BIM… The reality was that BIM was, is still largely used for drawing production, right? It's used for coordination, clash detection, and drawing production. "
–Anand Mecheri

My Highlights

• Anand’s past companies, all sold to Siemens (1:41)
• James’ favorite question (4:08)
• The problem and opportunity Anand saw in BIM (6:10)
• Deeper dive on Invicara (11:28)
• Rapid fire myth-busting on digital twins (15:22)
• Invicara today - Twinit.io, and enabling others to build their own solutions (26:47)
• The question of ontologies, and Invicara’s schema-less platform (37:21)
• Key differentiators: a complete kit of parts, a low-code platform for creating solutions, and more (41:49)
• Anand’s vision for the future (44:23)
• Asset owners’ role in unlocking industry change (49:12)

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“The more time we spend going to answer a hot/cold call, the less time we spend taking care of key issues and making sure the facilities really runs right. And you can't send a person around fast enough to check all the things that your technology solution can check. It's just not even practical to think of all the different things… So there is a huge payback for every single person that tries to do monitoring-based commissioning. It hasn't really failed yet… Um, I'll go back on that. Failure points are if you do nothing with the data.”
–Jeremy Macdonald

• Why buildings are so far behind: mixed up incentives (3:08)
• ISS - facilities management and workplace experience, not to be confused with the International Space Station (4:19)
• Intro to the world of FM / PM (9:29)
• How money exchanges hands in different outsourcing scenarios (13:18)
• ESG (28:58)
• Thinking about waste and energy, hard engineering and soft services (32:35)
• Waste tech (33:56)
• How analytics fits in (41:02)
• KPIs for outsourced facilities managers that analytics folks should be aware of (55:40)
• Obstacles to rolling out analytics-based services, and strategies to overcome them (59:39)
• Some things to look forward to in 2021 (1:01:50)

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“We've solved so many things where the engineering staff has been like, ‘I bet you this was going on for 10 years.’ It's been happening forever… whether that's a damper, whether the fans are running 24/7, whatever's broken. It's just really good at identifying things that would not otherwise be identified.”
—Adam Kaufman

• Why this university decided to pursue analytics (5:30)
• A history of software collecting dust on a virtual shelf (12:12)
• Universities’ place on the analytics adoption curve (22:31)
• Adams’s role as the super user Pt 1 (25:10)
• Drivers of success (36:35)
• Adams’s role as the super user Pt 2: the three workflow processes (39:18)
• The importance of the verification process (48:59)
• Baby stepping to other use cases (58:05)

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“Because that large scale technology transformation hasn’t happened, that’s probably the cause of outdated business models, lack of IT skillsets, lack of ownership of technology initiatives and leaving it to vendors, etc. It was once the same for other industries. I think the building owners themselves will be the champions of this change.”
–Rajavel Subramanian

• why buildings are so far behind, and lessons learned from the paths taken by IT & telecom industries (4:05)
• a brief refresher on the state of siloed software and the need for an overlay (10:09)
• introduction to the overlay solution (17:28)
• walking through the 5 categories of overlays: building, system, functional, data, and hybrid (19:29) and where Facilio’s solution fits in (31:57)
• platform consolidation (35:54)
• contextual integration (38:53)
• customized user experiences (41:05)
• Facilio’s plans for 2021 (45:13)

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“Every building owner is on their own path and it’s our job as an industry to meet them where they are on that path, not to yell at them from the end of the path, telling them that they're losers, if they're not over here.”
—Shannon Smith

• How Shannon got sucked into BMS (2:59)
• A ‘violent’ agreement with past answers to James’ favorite question + a unique take from Shannon’s finance perspective: debt mentality (6:55)
• Drivers of change: talent drain, tenant focus, COVID (10:52)
• Deep dive on PointGuard (12:26)
• The state of the analytics industry (14:21)
• The need for consolidation (22:10)
• Vitamin to painkiller perspective (26:06)
• Onboarding - the customers, and the buildings (34:13)
• Analytics for service contracts (38:31)
• Looking toward the future: analytics for COVID (41:40), what needs to be unlocked (44:43), and reasons for excitement in 2021 (45:19)

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“I think that leveraging both is incredibly important. You need the software to be modular enough to merge everything together. But you need a willingness for partnerships to then leverage the benefits that come out of that.”

—Josh Adams

• A new answer to the new favorite question: partnerships (9:05)
• What innovation looks like within the Big Four (13:49)
• An alternative to disruption; service contracts as an opportunity to innovate (17:36)
• Diving into Josh’s concept of digital twins, grounded in actual use cases (34:01)
• Pebble’s operations-first approach (45:24)
• Animated Insights’ perspective on open data and ontologies (57:56)
• Something to be excited about in 2021: Biden’s infrastructure package (1:00:29)

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“This is like the moral compass to our industry, right? We're totally fixated on customer benefits and savings; and in order to pivot so we are also considering grid benefits and GHGs, we need to make them valuable, and this is how we do it…”
—Matt Golden

• Diving into the ‘old world’ of utility incentives (8:51)
• Introducing the new model of mutual benefits (11:31)
• The struggle for standardized methods (17:00)
• The challenge of EM&V during COVID (29:19)
• Defining the buzzwords: virtual power plants (49:15), grid interactive buildings (51:06)
• Matt shares his unique perspective on James’ favorite question: competitive market access (54:37)
• Sources of excitement in 2021: The Year of the Virtual Power Plant (56:30)

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"We can’t try to bring them all [ontologies] together. We can’t make them all one. What we need to do is really focus on delivering the outcomes and delivering the use cases, and then have data engineers worry about how to normalize that data. Because at the end of the day, the ontology doesn't deliver any outcome. It only enables, right? It's not an outcome.”
–Brian Turner

• New year, new favorite question (5:17)
• Digging into Buildings IOT’s offerings: the ontology alignment project (OAP), JetStream, onPoint (8:41)
• What the domain-specific API is missing (19:21)
• How to ensure the independent data layer accommodates the client’s use cases (21:24)
• The need and (lack of?) demand for supervisory control, and the problems with reinventing the wheel for fairly consistent use cases (24:20)
• Brian’s perspective on the state of the industry as it relates to data modeling: the Ontology Wars (32:59)
• The concept of the ‘decoder ring,’ and the challenges of industry-wide collaboration (35:59)
• Deep dive into what an master systems integrator (MSI) is/does, and the fundamental problem with the industry in Brian’s view: conflicts of interest (45:01)
• Something to be excited about in 2021 (1:01:16)

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"It's not a technology question. It's not a performance problem. It's a people problem. If a new building is being built… and the owner says, “I want my OT system, security cameras, lighting, elevators… etc. to be on my IT network,” the simple question to ask is: is IT now going to be responsile for the construction phase and all the responsibilities of OT? "
—Ping Yao

• Ping explains the impetus for founding Optigo Networks (1:49)
• Answer to James’ favorite question (8:28)
• The average building network (10:38)
• Intro to IT vs OT, blurred lines (13:30)
• Diving into Optigo’s services, how they’ve evolved, and where they’re headed (19:27)
• Top three problems with BACnet (30:37)
• Back to the world of IT and OT (39:53)
• Understanding silos from a networking perspective, looking at industry trends (47:14)
• Reflecting on how to close the skills gaps in the industry (51:05)

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