In recent weeks I have been thinking about our business environment differently. The past few months have forced the majority of us to work in different ways. We have become in a very short time “remote workers.” in necessity and need.

Yet for many “newbies” in remote working, who have been working from home in these last few months, are now facing the decision of when and if they can return to their old normal of their office. It is a difficult decision and one that needs careful consideration and clarification of “how safe is this and what will have changed in my old working environment?”

Going back to the business office is undergoing such a radical shift due to the pandemic and all of what it has forced us to do; social distancing, being in lockdown, minimizing physical contact. The environment we work in is not simply a physical one, it has become a psychological one to manage as well.

During this week I was listening to one of a series of discussions or webinars about the massive changes being undergoing in a new reality in our business buildings. These helpful discussions instigated by Comfy called “thinking beyond workplace re-entry” was timely, and very relevant to trigger my thinking a little more.

We all need to feel reassured it is safe to return to our place of work expecting the place of work has suddenly changed to something radically different. One where we will be managed differently, working from home for days of a week and treating the office space as a place to not go every day but for collaborative and team situations and meetings needed to attend, but in radically different ways by keeping physical distance.

What was accepted as normal in the past for bringing people together in a common working environment is undergoing fundamental change, and this needs managing and optimizing differently.

You have to also wonder at this point in time has the future of work we have all understood was coming towards us is suddenly, in less than four months, actually arrived? Like anything new, it is often messy and needs our thinking to evolve to adjust to a new normal.

Firstly, our working environment is radically changing.

Whereas in the past, the management of properties was concerned with maximizing their occupancy yield, utilization, and the density of space by driving these upwards of 85% plus in productivity and efficiency methods, today, the whole need has changed.

The new paradigm is where these working environments are safe. The density of space has pivoted to “making space” and “providing trust” with the returning employee looking at two essential points of concern.

Firstly, will I feel safe in returning to work? Secondly, how can I navigate my space to keep social distancing and know the environment is safe.

Presently there is a need to manage space utilization and density down at safe levels of 30% to allow for social distancing and providing reassurance and trust that the working environment, post-Corona Virus, is a safe place to go back too.

The health and safety of employees have become paramount.

The new norm in building and office management and office is to keep to our own safe spaces, to minimize overcrowding and physical contact. To achieve this, employers and building management have been looking at developing different ways, guidelines, and policies to navigate this change of giving you “personal safe space”.

It is not simply a matter of “just turning up” anymore, it is turning up at the appropriate times that allow for a collaborative environment that is safe, secure, and well-managed on all the health and safety issues we are learning about due to the Corona Virus. Our place of work needs greater scheduling, be it at home or in our old office environment radically different

Today, the management of this change in working environments has extended well beyond one office, it has become one that needs to function in multiple places. These include our home or spaces where work can be undertaken, including your old office building and this, requires a robust technology solution.

We need to migrate our different technologies required in this “at a distance” world to enable us to stay connected, fully engaged, and highly collaborative, and maintain our productivity. We need different tools to have a way to communicate, to schedule, to plan, to attend or not, and that again needs a series of technology platforms.

The conversation I listened too triggered a load of thoughts for me

• Today our workspaces are not about “utilization and maximizing the density of space”, it is about safety, protecting the health of the employee, giving that right environment that they will be feeling safe.
• It is all about knowing that having my space being well and thoughtfully managed so I can feel comfortable and believe my office environment is a “healthy building” that supports my needs and concerns and keeps me safe and well.
• Each building has a lifecycle that needs constant management that connects with our needs in different ways- it becomes unique to each of us, and technology joins all of this up.
• Our buildings are dynamic and adjusting. Actually, the building is now needing to adjust to us, not the other way round.
• We still need to make a building intelligent so it all needs to be connected up. That takes time and as we move towards a new normal the essentials of connecting up a building will need to accelerate.
• The new standards of connected building performance are keeping “us” safe and secure but they still have to optimize to give a different “yield” of performance.
• If our utilization and occupancy readjust to only 30% density of floor occupancy what does that mean in rents, use, and a building’s economical future? That new uncertainty has yet to play out.
• The shift we are undergoing is the person entering the building needs to feel safe and secure. The data collected will be far more informing them of their environment than ever before.

We are entering a world of new smarter connecting possibilities

Having services that respond to demand, even perhaps anticipate your needs, react to changes, or provide an environment where monitoring is for your security and safety, one that can give you not just a feeling of belonging but a “peace of mind” to allow you to simply just get on with the work you need to do.

It has been argued that providing a  comfortable environment positively improves our cognitive abilities; it allows us to concentrate and problem-solve and builds that feeling that we can be more innovative. To bring back employees we need to make that environment as safe, secure, and personal to their needs.

Managing our buildings intelligently is on a radically different plain now

Much of the change is ahead. For instance, you begin to appreciate the value of having a fully connected building and technology solutions that will I am sure going to evolve rapidly by technology companies like Comfy.

The value of the single app gives all those involved in the working environment a comfort to be fully connected up to get on with their assigned jobs.

Having office solutions that connect your environment is yet another “accelerant” to a digitally transformed world, dramatically brought on by the pandemic where technology will continue to give us even more space and utility to perform in new ways.

It is amazing how a webinar can trigger your thinking so much

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Smart solutions for resolving the demands placed in everyday events like traffic flows, energy, and water requirements, transportation utilization, or in managing energy peak demands or optimizing buildings.

Through digital understanding, you learn from what is in place to improve the future in designs, capability, and asset utilization through the use of intelligent data providing relevant insights.

A digital understanding can help predict many variances and assumptions, for example on load demands, on traffic flow, on shifting resources to balance the “system” for the immediate and future; all of these are based on the data collected and can be compared on the forecasts made.

To achieve this, you need a constant flow of ‘real-time’ data, not historical ‘lagging’ information, that is often out of date before you can evaluate it.

Modernizing the infrastructure

Smart infrastructure provides many of the solutions for the journey all cities must travel. 

Infrastructure for our cities needs a massive injection of new investment. These investments are not just in resolving many of the gaps of today’s infrastructure, but in the critical decision about deploying new technology and solutions, that build the future sustaining capacity, and these have significant long-term implications.

Cities have often outdated, antiquated yet critical infrastructure that has passed its ‘useful life’ in nearly all our cities. Regularly cities are patching these up to keep them functioning and going, yet for how long?  This legacy is in the equipment, within our buildings, transportation, different services, often essential services or necessary facilities, so they can still function properly. The cost of investing in the new or maintaining the old is a constant ongoing decision faced. Continually today, citizens are faced with the inevitable disruption of daily life, and that often lies in the breaking down of our infrastructure.

The challenges are significant in all that is needed to be tackled in cities. The decisions to be made on how we set about renovating existing infrastructure as this is often harder to solve than building the new. The value in extending the “useful commercial life” of a building or a highway is critical as we transverse to smart cities.

We need to ask continually is this a better sustaining “return” than investing in the new? The difficulties are not just when and where to invest, but in what solutions that are fit for future scaling out, to turn infrastructure into connected smart infrastructure. To help in this and many crucial decisions, it becomes essential to building out our intelligent, digitally reliant systems, for our future.

As we transition to smart cities, we need to explain all of what this means

Smart infrastructure investment will need a different dialogue to engage the citizen, as any radical pathway has its disruptive, challenging, and demanding periods to go through.

Just imagine reconciling the various stakeholders’ interests and what all of this might mean in their understanding of the impact on their lives future value and returns? Expectations are diverse, fragmented, and often resistant. We need better ways to communicate the needs and why the solutions offered are necessary and in the interests of all.

Offering solutions that are seemingly “dry” in understanding, just based only on digital and technology does need for a  different innovation model to be explained. It is not technology alone that are building the necessary physical houses, new hospitals or schools; it is projecting out a different view of the future where innovation has a crucial role to play that can provide a differentator seeking to improved quality of life.

We need to create and leave amply space for innovation to thrive

With increasing demands placed on a city’s infrastructure, there is a need for a  system change, one that will have a different cost/ impact relationship placed on us all. With so many critical issues to resolve in our infrastructure and cities, the potential returns from new inventions need a fresh impetus and restating. It involves the understanding of the value of future innovation and what this can bring.

Giving innovation enough space through technology can enable our solutions to move beyond just “smart” but to be designed to be highly adaptive and responsive ways, to resolve present-day problems. Ones that we can interlink the challenges, strengthen their dependence and offer solutions that benefit the citizen, to achieve a better quality of life, delivering a city ecosystem that connects and engages all to function well.

Innovation in the future holds the key to old and new alike; it delivers smart infrastructure solutions that can ‘break into’ many of our present problems to solve them and manage these more effectively through more intelligent insight, exploration, and actions.

Designing a roadmap of Smart Infrastructure Solutions

Cities around the world are expected to spend $41 trillion on smart city upgrades in the next 20 years; much of this will be through applying innovation in their designs. Large-scale infrastructure improvements projects are immense, they take years for completion, and these need financing and thinking through in a comprehensive manner.

A well thought through roadmap of solutions, based on sound and relevant information gives a much better chance to deliver the critical environment needed for reacting to the future. Cities can map out and visualize options and plan out future scenario’s using the data collected through having a digital smartness.

By providing a roadmap built on digital and technology understanding can help in different planning scenarios or options, ones that can predict sudden shocks or projecting response to various crises. Or modeling the flow of daily life in more informed, intelligent ways, gathered from the data of the city, that provides better planning and decision-making scope would offer a more dynamic and relevant realization of the need for future investments.

So much of our challenge today is to deliver improved solutions. These need to focus upon increased capacity; energy, mobility, water, sanitation, protection, health-related services, and this all requires critical information coming from connected data insights then explained to all stakeholders involved. To do this, a city planner or the elected officials need to manage the conversations in radically different ways, where engagement and inclusiveness are central for all; dialogues are consistent, frank and open, cohesive and constant, entirely understandable, and well explained.

As we prepare for the future, we do need to think differently

Smart infrastructure connects many parts of the city both physically and digitally. Services that capture the relevant information enable the deployment and introduction of the appropriate assets as the solutions. Smart solutions for resolving the demands placed in everyday events like traffic flows, energy, and water requirements,transportation utilization, or in managing energy peak demands or optimizing buildings.

The mission to make infrastructure intelligent is only at the beginning. Smart infrastructures provide the foundations to smart cities, to build and re-equip the physical assets deployed with their technology component.

The post Deploying smart infrastructure, a journey needing to happen first appeared on Innovating the Energy Transition.

Image Credit: https://analyticsindiamag.com, Gaurav Burman

In an extraordinary time of being “locked down,” we appreciate the safe haven we call home, the office, or the working environment. We are expecting it to be a safe environment for us to continue to operate and provide us the comfort and protection we are all looking for.

Having intelligent connected structures is playing an increasing role in our lives, in the mission of your organization, in your loved one’s daily lives; in offices, in our building like hospitals, in government offices, in research labs or schools, and most importantly in our homes.

We often do not recognize everything that goes int our building to deliver an optimal or suitable space for us to be productive. We assume it is there, working and functioning as required. It is when something goes wrong, we begin to notice. It is when we have time to stop and look around we begin to wonder how we can improve our environments. There is a lot we can do, and as we learn to work increasingly “at a distance.”

Our buildings today have the potential to be fully connected-up digitally, controlled, and managed in the background, working away “quietly,” functioning, efficiently, and effectively. To get to this point, it needs constant monitoring and managing. Our building in the present and future need investing in.

We need to view buildings differently

We often do not stop and think about what is actually around us. It is when you appreciate an environment that has fire protection, climate control, proper ventilation, lighting, continually adjusting in heating and cooling, knowing physical security, life safety and many “simply accepted” building systems ‘quietly’ working away, all in the background, you realize it has such an impact on your daily life when you need it.

I call that quiet management, hidden in plain sight. The Intel processor story comes to mind here. It became synonymous with your computer as the central core processor that enabled your computer to work, it was essential and expected to work each time you turned your computer on.

A building needs the same central core processor reliant on technology. The core need is no different from the Intel processor, to needs to be efficient, available on-demand, sustainable, and in the case of buildings, liveable and attractive, and all that takes hard, sustained focused work.

Real estate is one of the most significant expenses we all encounter in our lives.

Real estate can be the biggest single asset for investment and highly valuable to maintain. In our building today, we are putting 40% of our global energy demand. When you also realize cities are consuming 75% plus of all global energy resources and contributing 80% to global emissions then managing the infrastructure and assets becomes critical to reduce the impact this is having on our planet.

In the past, real estate management had been regarded as sunk costs, expensed, where yield dominated decisions once it was up and functioning. Today through the change to smart connected buildings, it is seen as a real asset that continues to build value through the enhancement of its function ability and appeal.

The energy design of the building certainly needs to be optimized; the assets and resources more effectively utilized. We need to provide the essential aspects of a comfortable indoor environment that works consistently, delivering to the tenant’s needs. We need this enhanced environment for the tenant, and the landlord and also for those investing.

It is having the partnership within the services, a building provides a safe, secure and well-run facility that provides a “productive” environment. The combination of physical and digital within smart-building solutions enables the ability to deliver valuable services that “enhances” productivity and effectiveness, for those working and reliant on having a place to work.

By collecting and evaluating smart data gives us the source to build a central command center to manage the facility. This command center becomes much like the central nervous systems (data centers) where it can sense and respond. It can plan, predict and anticipate, as well as to balance and reconcile competing interests and demands placed on our buildings. The emphasis is on ensuring uptime, reliability, optimizing the environment to allow for an efficient and productive environment for all involved.

Extracting Value by deploying Smart Technology

To deliver smart infrastructure into buildings needs robust, reliable technology. It is through the combinations of utilizing advanced technology solutions that we obtain the intelligence from its digitalization. Smart Infrastructure of buildings have the solutions and the tools to do the job of managing energy, water, air, heating, cooling and security, movement and utilization that each building is expected to provide in its management.

To achieve what we need out of our working environment, we increasingly recognize the operating environment needs to be fully connected-up, to provide the service we need. As a building and equally city infrastructure become more intelligent, the benefits begin to be realized, not just for those working within the environment but for those investing in a property or infrastructure solutions, as giving both immediate impact and long-term value.

Infrastructure needs to be viewed differently than the past

Investments in infrastructure, like smart buildings, need to become more central to any vision of being smart within cities; through technology solutions that give us momentum towards sustainability and opportunity.

Being smart connects us as individuals into our place, it enables us to make a greater ‘productive’ contribution by being more aware of our environment. Future connected buildings help make us part of something intelligent, the places we live and work where we can shape and influence a better creative future in different ways. We move from being isolated to being part of a community.

Recognizing that intelligence is one increasingly based on information infrastructure, that is informing and delivering a different, more efficient environment through the solutions available or emerging is offering a different future to live and work within.

These are smart infrastructure solutions that are transforming our world.

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