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For June’s Member Gathering, Cristal Ortiz and Andrew Knueppel shared their LinkedIn team’s vision for smart buildings and detailed how they put that into action on marquee buildings in their Dublin campus known as Wilton Park.
They believe having a “smart building is about delivering high-performance spaces that are comfortable, healthy, and sustainable for occupants.” Their charge is to “create the most sustainable and resilient workplaces in the world that reflect our company values, inspire employees, and solve the built environment’s most challenging problems.”
They have around $200 million in cap ex and about $1.7 million in op ex annually to accomplish that, so they’ve established a program that enables them to be diligent with their resources and prescriptive with their results.
While the focus of their efforts, like most in their sustainability shoes, is on new construction, Cristal and Andrew noted they are working to shift their attention toward operations as well.
“Once we complete a design and build project, we’re handing over to operations so it’s important to work there and be able to do a clean handoff, understand exactly where the state of the building is, for better or worse,” Cristal said. “Something we’re trying to pivot to is being more involved during operations, especially when you look at the fact that we have about 6 million square feet under lease, but we’re only operating about 4 million square feet.”
Their established metrics, or Key Performance Indicators, allow them that space to apply their program to both sides of the coin and make it easy to report on their progress. While they noted some of these are more detailed than others, at a high level they’re solving for:
Experience metrics:
Sustainability metrics:
Resilience metrics:
Also interesting are the built in “risk to mitigate” factors of:
You’ll notice for this sustainability team at LinkedIn, it’s not only about ROI. Andrew explained it like this:
“To give one example, for air quality, in a project we’re doing right now [we’re] designing for a target CO2 setpoint that we want to achieve using increased fresh air. In commissioning, we can validate that we’re actually able to achieve that target. And when you think about it operationally, we can do something like a CO2 index that gives us the percent of time that we spend above that level. That’s what allows us to unify across all the phases and show value. And that’s a good example of why we don’t always focus on ROI - it’s really more about the impact to the business relative to the cost.”
Additionally beyond ROI, these metrics allow Cristal and Andrew’s team to make the business case for lighting designs that impact resource efficiency, battery storage that improves business uptime, usage reductions or on-site generation to mitigate rising utility costs.
“The idea is to come up with metrics that align with the intent of what we’re trying to do but are also simple to collect and allow us to generally improve sustainability,” Andrew said. “Without these metrics, we wouldn’t be able to capture [these things] as being valuable.”
With that framework defined, Cristal and Andrew’s team have put it to the test on several buildings in various stages of construction at LinkedIn’s new Dublin offices at Wilton Park.
“There are three buildings there. It will be a total of about 150,000 square feet,” Cristal noted.
One Wilton Park, which opened in 2022, represented the first time the Engineering & Sustainability team was involved in a major construction project at LinkedIn. And this one was major, as it was the first smart building in their portfolio.
“We were solving for very different things at that time than we are now,” Andrew said, “and I wanted to share what that journey looked like.”
“The first thing we were solving,” Andrew continued, “was trust in our team. If we think back to when we joined, it was right at the start of construction. There had been a lot of consultants involved. There was a lot of complexity - between 20 and 30 systems were to be integrated in the building but there was a general sense of apprehension.”
He admitted they “weren’t really sure that it was going to work.”
So they simplified.
“We [focused] down to something that we felt we could really deliver on, and that was fault detection.”
So that became the front end, but behind the scenes this enabled the Engineering & Sustainability team to pilot more foundational elements of their smart building framework including a single naming convention and cybersecurity testing as well as the independent data layer.
“By showing that we could deliver a success, we helped preserve the momentum of the smart building program.”
In this, Andrew felt they were able to retain their energy to tackle the entire smart building portfolio. Because ultimately, smart building is an evolutionary process that can be built upon over time and across departments.
“It does become something that is relatively new and needs a lot of change management and understanding across the whole team. … Smart building is a process, we don’t have to do everything right now. We can develop as an organization and as our operations teams learn new workflows, we can take those successes and build on them going forward.”
As they are in design for the next Wilton Park building while the first is operational, they’re able to take both the learnings from the initial design and construction phase and to incorporate the needs of the operations team to improve as they go.
“They know what their current problems are and what they’re trying to solve for. So when we develop use cases for smart building, we start with them and we start with their actual challenges. And that helps us explain the value proposition and gives us a set of smaller use cases that we can actually deliver and build on.”
It also ensures that the workflow remains top of mind for each use case. Questions like where will operations go to access this information? What will they do with it? How does it fit into their daily work?
Some of the loftier goals for their second foray into smart building include:
Nexus Pro Members will be especially pleased to hear there was some additional perspective shared on the independent data layer during the Q&A portion of the event. You can listen to the full recording here.
“The first thing we were solving,” Andrew continued, “was trust in our team. If we think back to when we joined, it was right at the start of construction. There had been a lot of consultants involved. There was a lot of complexity - between 20 and 30 systems were to be integrated in the building but there was a general sense of apprehension.”
He admitted they “weren’t really sure that it was going to work.”
So they simplified.
“We [focused] down to something that we felt we could really deliver on, and that was fault detection.”
So that became the front end, but behind the scenes this enabled the Engineering & Sustainability team to pilot more foundational elements of their smart building framework including a single naming convention and cybersecurity testing as well as the independent data layer.
“By showing that we could deliver a success, we helped preserve the momentum of the smart building program.”
In this, Andrew felt they were able to retain their energy to tackle the entire smart building portfolio. Because ultimately, smart building is an evolutionary process that can be built upon over time and across departments.
“It does become something that is relatively new and needs a lot of change management and understanding across the whole team. … Smart building is a process, we don’t have to do everything right now. We can develop as an organization and as our operations teams learn new workflows, we can take those successes and build on them going forward.”
As they are in design for the next Wilton Park building while the first is operational, they’re able to take both the learnings from the initial design and construction phase and to incorporate the needs of the operations team to improve as they go.
“They know what their current problems are and what they’re trying to solve for. So when we develop use cases for smart building, we start with them and we start with their actual challenges. And that helps us explain the value proposition and gives us a set of smaller use cases that we can actually deliver and build on.”
It also ensures that the workflow remains top of mind for each use case. Questions like where will operations go to access this information? What will they do with it? How does it fit into their daily work?
Some of the loftier goals for their second foray into smart building include:
Nexus Pro Members will be especially pleased to hear there was some additional perspective shared on the independent data layer during the Q&A portion of the event. You can listen to the full recording here.
“The first thing we were solving,” Andrew continued, “was trust in our team. If we think back to when we joined, it was right at the start of construction. There had been a lot of consultants involved. There was a lot of complexity - between 20 and 30 systems were to be integrated in the building but there was a general sense of apprehension.”
He admitted they “weren’t really sure that it was going to work.”
So they simplified.
“We [focused] down to something that we felt we could really deliver on, and that was fault detection.”
So that became the front end, but behind the scenes this enabled the Engineering & Sustainability team to pilot more foundational elements of their smart building framework including a single naming convention and cybersecurity testing as well as the independent data layer.
“By showing that we could deliver a success, we helped preserve the momentum of the smart building program.”
In this, Andrew felt they were able to retain their energy to tackle the entire smart building portfolio. Because ultimately, smart building is an evolutionary process that can be built upon over time and across departments.
“It does become something that is relatively new and needs a lot of change management and understanding across the whole team. … Smart building is a process, we don’t have to do everything right now. We can develop as an organization and as our operations teams learn new workflows, we can take those successes and build on them going forward.”
As they are in design for the next Wilton Park building while the first is operational, they’re able to take both the learnings from the initial design and construction phase and to incorporate the needs of the operations team to improve as they go.
“They know what their current problems are and what they’re trying to solve for. So when we develop use cases for smart building, we start with them and we start with their actual challenges. And that helps us explain the value proposition and gives us a set of smaller use cases that we can actually deliver and build on.”
It also ensures that the workflow remains top of mind for each use case. Questions like where will operations go to access this information? What will they do with it? How does it fit into their daily work?
Some of the loftier goals for their second foray into smart building include:
Nexus Pro Members will be especially pleased to hear there was some additional perspective shared on the independent data layer during the Q&A portion of the event. You can listen to the full recording here.
For June’s Member Gathering, Cristal Ortiz and Andrew Knueppel shared their LinkedIn team’s vision for smart buildings and detailed how they put that into action on marquee buildings in their Dublin campus known as Wilton Park.
They believe having a “smart building is about delivering high-performance spaces that are comfortable, healthy, and sustainable for occupants.” Their charge is to “create the most sustainable and resilient workplaces in the world that reflect our company values, inspire employees, and solve the built environment’s most challenging problems.”
They have around $200 million in cap ex and about $1.7 million in op ex annually to accomplish that, so they’ve established a program that enables them to be diligent with their resources and prescriptive with their results.
While the focus of their efforts, like most in their sustainability shoes, is on new construction, Cristal and Andrew noted they are working to shift their attention toward operations as well.
“Once we complete a design and build project, we’re handing over to operations so it’s important to work there and be able to do a clean handoff, understand exactly where the state of the building is, for better or worse,” Cristal said. “Something we’re trying to pivot to is being more involved during operations, especially when you look at the fact that we have about 6 million square feet under lease, but we’re only operating about 4 million square feet.”
Their established metrics, or Key Performance Indicators, allow them that space to apply their program to both sides of the coin and make it easy to report on their progress. While they noted some of these are more detailed than others, at a high level they’re solving for:
Experience metrics:
Sustainability metrics:
Resilience metrics:
Also interesting are the built in “risk to mitigate” factors of:
You’ll notice for this sustainability team at LinkedIn, it’s not only about ROI. Andrew explained it like this:
“To give one example, for air quality, in a project we’re doing right now [we’re] designing for a target CO2 setpoint that we want to achieve using increased fresh air. In commissioning, we can validate that we’re actually able to achieve that target. And when you think about it operationally, we can do something like a CO2 index that gives us the percent of time that we spend above that level. That’s what allows us to unify across all the phases and show value. And that’s a good example of why we don’t always focus on ROI - it’s really more about the impact to the business relative to the cost.”
Additionally beyond ROI, these metrics allow Cristal and Andrew’s team to make the business case for lighting designs that impact resource efficiency, battery storage that improves business uptime, usage reductions or on-site generation to mitigate rising utility costs.
“The idea is to come up with metrics that align with the intent of what we’re trying to do but are also simple to collect and allow us to generally improve sustainability,” Andrew said. “Without these metrics, we wouldn’t be able to capture [these things] as being valuable.”
With that framework defined, Cristal and Andrew’s team have put it to the test on several buildings in various stages of construction at LinkedIn’s new Dublin offices at Wilton Park.
“There are three buildings there. It will be a total of about 150,000 square feet,” Cristal noted.
One Wilton Park, which opened in 2022, represented the first time the Engineering & Sustainability team was involved in a major construction project at LinkedIn. And this one was major, as it was the first smart building in their portfolio.
“We were solving for very different things at that time than we are now,” Andrew said, “and I wanted to share what that journey looked like.”
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