November Digest: Cheaper than therapy

Hey friends, happy Friday!

Welcome to another monthly digest… a collection of ideas I’ve been working on and thinking about this month.

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1—Member gathering recording

For November’s member gathering, we tried something new, and I think it worked great! One of you sent me a note afterward:

“the best $25 a month! really great experience”

We had two breakout rooms, each discussing one of these prompts:

• Breakout room 1: What’s your 2030 vision for our industry? Describe what the operational and occupant experience looks like in ten years.
• Breakout room 2: What are the biggest obstacles to your 2030 vision?

It was interesting to me as a spectator watching some diverging opinions appear and seeing how much we all agree on.

Here’s the recording for those of you that weren’t able to attend. If you’re low on time, check out the report-out from breakout room 1 at 21:00 and the report-out for breakout room 2 at 56:30.

Thank you to all of you who attended our group therapy session. 😂

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2—December member gathering preview

For our December gathering this Wednesday, we’re going to do something similar! Here are the topics I’m thinking about:

1. New architectures: Platforms, ecosystems, marketplaces, digital twins, distributed architecture
2. Ontologies (Haystack, Brick, Googles’s DBO, Microsoft DTDL + RealEstateCore, etc)

First breakout: what are the current trends you see in this area? Second breakout: what will 2021 look like for that area? This time, I’ll kick us off with my current thoughts in each area and then send us into breakout rooms.

And in future gatherings, I’m thinking we’ll do the same but hit these topics next:

1. Occupants: COVID, healthy buildings, and prioritizing the occupant experience
2. Analytics: AI, advanced supervisory control, moving beyond energy/HVAC
3. Investing and legislation: consolidation and rollups, VCs, codes and local laws, ESG
4. Connectivity: IT/OT gap and cybersecurity

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3—Getting started with digital twins

I was recently involved in reviewing a digital twin provider’s sales process and proposal for a fairly large portfolio of brownfield office and research facilities. While I’m excited about this provider’s offering, I was underenthused by their project development approach and recommendations. Essentially they were proposing to start by installing new IAQ and occupancy sensor networks from the start, at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars per building, in an attempt to enable more advanced use cases right away.

I believe the true value of the overlay, and similarly the digital twin variety of the overlay, is to enable new use cases with the underlying systems that are deployed right now in a future-proof way. In other words, just because the digital twin allows future-readiness, doesn’t mean that’s where you start. You start by enabling quick value with high ROI and then expand each year from there, continuing to add value as you gain trust throughout the organization.

What do you think?

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4—Extending the lessons of the “BAS Architecture of the Future” to other silos

Two recent conversations recently converged in my mind and I’d love your input on this. The first conversation was with Joe G. on all of the new silos that are getting connected to the IP network in the average building. His point was that it’s no longer just the BAS, folks.

The second conversation was, well, actually three conversations with Matt Schwartz on the BAS architecture of the future. And the point of convergence between these two was this: how do we get all the other silos in the building to start to standardize, specify, and design their systems in this new way?

Joe thinks we need to get those folks into the Nexus community: lighting folks, access control folks, etc. Another way to think about this is how does the smart building community break out of our BAS-centric mindset?

What do you think?

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5—Members-only

Besides this digest, there were 4 deep dives / members-only posts in November, in case you missed any of them:

• Episode #28 reaction: making the business case for any industry
• Implementing the BAS Architecture of the Future
• Episode #27 reaction: why we can't count on connectivity
• Episode #26 reaction: the shift beyond efficiency to user experience

☝️And just a quick note on these. It doesn’t seem like many of you read or care much about the podcast deep dives with my reaction and the transcripts. The last few have had less than 10% engagement, compared to the other deep dives which have 70+%. We’re going to cut those out starting in 2021 and spend the time to produce value through other pieces of content.

Thanks for reading and thanks for being a Nexus Pro member.

And I’ll see you Wednesday at our monthly gathering!

—James