Collaboration allows us to know more than we are capable of knowing by ourselves.
Collaborative thinking is аn interactive process that involves a higher lеvеl оf communication and a mindset that іѕ different than working alone. We need to better understand the complex mosaic and rapid creation potential of our collaborative teams.
To do the simplest tasks we now need to collaborate. And collaboration now includes people, devices, apps, databases, electrical grids and much more. COVID forced us all to collaborate because we could not succeed without online collaboration in everything we do. We are quickly learning what the younger folks already knew: that the anytime anywhere power and speed of online collaboration is amazing.
Our industry doesn’t have much of a tradition of collaboration. Collaboration is a new experience for us. Think of the powerful collaboration of Uber and Google Maps. That collaboration is so intertwined it becomes hard to separate each player's value and functions. That's the kind of thinking we need. When we collaborate, what value do they bring to us and what value do we bring to them? Our collaborative presence needs to achieve an identifiable difference.
My most recent industry collaboration was done very quickly, and all of it was done online. Within the last couple of weeks we put together our 12 free education sessions for AHR Expo in Las Vegas.
Here’s a complete list: 2022 Las Vegas AHR Expo Educational Sessions. From the intro:
In this ninth annual Connection Community Collaboratory, Marc Petock leads an open conversation with industry influencers who will discuss a variety of subjects that are playing a role in making our built environment smarter and sustainable.
Topics to include the convergence of the operational experience with the workplace experience; what is driving the market---the technology side of the business side; EV; Water; ESG; Digital Twining; the entrance of new protocols; who is responsible for the occupant experience; how is the industry conversation is changing and more.
This year—our 22nd year at the Expo—our theme is navigating the adoption of smarter buildings with sustainable BAS.
We have been at this industry collaboration for a while. In 2013 we started Connection Communities Collaboration group on LinkedIn, and we’ve since met at every in-person AHR Expo. Here’s the abstract from our last one, “2020 Visions” held in Orlando:
The connection community is growing while rapidly changing how we connect with a plethora of enterprise software platforms and new connection standards like 5G CBRS. We are reminded of the dot-com days of radical change. Can so many platforms exist without dot-crashing? Hard to say as these platforms require an amazing community of practice to be successful. Often it turns out the community has more value than the actual platforms.
Maybe a better way to view each platform is as a community of practice (COP), not a software identity. In this manner, I feel success can be achieved using the COP that created that platform. It is not the secret sauce of the platforms but the people that bring the solutions and structure and innovative features. When they are removed, the platform value is questioned.
Recalibrate for 2020 provides an amazing capture with opinion and observation. At our 8th Collaboratory, experts will speak of their 2020 vision. Lots of scopes to be blurred out in only five minutes by the industry expert who will also provide their visions for Integrating the OCCUPANT EXPERIENCE into Smart Buildings.
Here’s the ControlTrends video of our 2020 Connection Community Collaboratory. From the intro:
The 8th Annual Connection Community Collaboratory offers useful insights into the future of HVAC and Smart Building Controls. Hosted and moderated by automatedbuildings.com Ken Sinclair, this panel of Industry Experts including Lynxspring’s Marc Petock, Sky Foundry’s John Petze, Contemporary Control’s George Thomas, Distech’s Martin Villeneuve, and EnOcean’s Troy Davis offer invaluable insights into the future of HVAC IOT and Smart Building Controls.
Now in its 18th year, Cybersecurity Awareness Month—observed every October—continues to be a collaborative effort between government and industry to ensure both businesses and consumers are aware of the cybersecurity pitfalls and have the resources and knowledge to stay safer and more secure online. Amazing and more necessary than ever.
Another great example of collaboration is The Project Haystack Organization (www.project-haystack.org), a community addressing the challenge of utilizing semantic modeling and tagging to streamline the interchange and interoperability of data among different systems, devices, equipment, and software applications.
Connections Magazine is the organization's biannual publication on data interoperability, tagging models, reference implementations, applications, and use case stories from the global community. Previous issues can be viewed at: https://marketing.project-haystack.org/connections-magazine/past-issues.
Our AutomatedBuildings.com October theme is, Collaboration, Integration, Education. We need to better understand the complex mosaic of our collective collaborative teams which we now are all part of. We are now required to work with the strangest of bedfellows and, in addition to that, there's our close relationship with edge devices, clouds, apps, AI databases, not to mention the rapid electrification of everything. The sustainability of the electrical grid's rapid evolution depends on everything collaborating. So collaboration, and understanding what it is we need to collaborate with, is our goal.
This white paper on the AI benefits to the electrical grid caught my eye. Key quote:
The efforts to decarbonize the global energy system are leading to an increasingly integrated and electrified energy system, with much more interaction between the power, transport, industry and building sectors. The move to decarbonize the energy supply is also leading to high levels of decentralization in the power sector. This will require much higher levels of coordination and flexibility from all sector players—including consumers—in order to manage this increasingly complex system and optimize it for minimal greenhouse gas emissions.
That's very interesting, because that's all going to require more control, more collaboration, more integration, and more education.
Monday Live!'s October theme is Industry Collaboration. This week we’re joined by Terry Sharp, President of the Building Controls Industry Association (BCIA) in the UK. Join us to learn about how we can work collaboratively to further the deployment of smarter buildings.
This also caught my eye, a LinkedIn discussion between Brian Turner and Nicholas Waern, our contributing editor. They talk knowledge, transformation, and solving metadata interoperability challenges in practice.
Here’s another great LinkedIn discussion with Contributing Editor Scott Cochrane on choosing whom to collaborate with:
Well, that’s it, I’m officially dropping the gauntlet on IT departments of businesses that exist in buildings with a modern BAS system within. The business of IT is to connect, protect, manage, deliver, all sorts of cool stuff in a digital world. They are the heart and soul of our business and are a part of every aspect, but does a business IT department really need to be a part of their building's comfort, safety and security systems?
Here's great counter from James Dice and his group supporting IT solutions. But the true answer is: it depends. Who you collaborate with and when is a complex issue. Collaboration is a complicated moving target often driven by your client.
Our Collaborating world is ever expanding as the graphic in this LinkedIn post clearly shows. If all sites had their data accessible from a published API or an open standard like MQTT, how does that change our approach to the Smart Infrastructure space?
Collaboration now extends between edge devices and clouds and is well explained in this article by David Sciarrino, LEED AP, Why Cloud and Edge Intelligence Need Each Other in the Smart Building Space:
There is a common misconception that AI at the edge replaces AI in the cloud and vice-versa. When you look at the challenges that each of these two approaches has independently, it becomes clear that they need each other. Let’s talk about the cloud first.
There are now dozens of cloud providers and thousands of software companies creating innovative ways to turn data into “actionable insights”. These solutions usually live in the cloud which allows them to easily scale the solution across multiple clients. These cloud applications also require large amounts of data usually generated from multiple sources. Getting this data out of an IT system has its challenges but it is manageable…
We need an industry image change to encourage younger collaborators to join us. There is a general perception that we are about dirty water in pipes, when that's not really what we do. We are about making buildings perform efficiently and maximizing the user experience of those buildings and occupant comfort. We have a pool of motivated and highly educated engineers coming into the marketplace. But we're not describing ourselves adequately.
We don't talk about what we do. In reality, we're making buildings work. And that's exciting. But we don't talk about that. That's not how we market ourselves. We need to tell the story about how we make these buildings work, and how we take this technology these students have learned through schools and colleges, and how it can be applied.
We need to attract the talent of enthusiastic young people. Attract, retain them, and develop a regime to replace the old apprenticeship system that the big four manufacturers used to follow. This is an opportunity, not a threat. Amen! To grow our industry we need to embrace collaboration with those we do not yet know, allowing us to know more than we are capable of knowing by ourselves.
Another organization working to foster collaboration is the Coalition for Smarter Buildings. From their mission statement:
We envision a world where people live, learn, work, and play in healthy, comfortable, and productive built-spaces, enabled by smart digital technologies that ensure sustainable and economically responsible development and operation.
Finally, the Open Source Stack Tool is a free industry collaboration tool that shows how we best collaborate with each other to achieve our clients’ aims.