Smart Building Challenges and Opportunities

Various barriers and opportunities exist within the Smart Building industry. Below is a summary of some of the core points hindering and accelerating the market today. Each of these have varying degrees of influence, and in general, the Smart Building industry lags behind many other industries, but it is clear that the pandemic has accelerated adoption. There is a renewed focus on occupant wellbeing, contactless technology, occupant analytics and remote management tools and solutions. Below is a breakdown of some of our observations:

Challenges

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity has typically been the number one barrier to smart buildings. Security, privacy, integrity, and availability of data are top concerns. We have seen some solutions beginning to address this issue, but the concern is high on the agenda of most customers.

There is a need for industry standards that create a benchmark for everyone to comply with. As more and more components connect to the internet the risk increases, therefore It is always going to be a challenge for the industry. We need to work together to minimise risk, having a collaborative approach utilising industry standards help us create secure, truly smart buildings.

Personal Data

Building occupants willingness to provide or share personal information and sign up to IoT services will increasingly depend on whether they trust the entity responsible for storing and analysing their data to protect their privacy and use it in a fair, legal and accountable manner. By capturing personal information, buildings can adapt to occupants specific needs, learn preferences and provide a great experience. However, at a time when the public is more aware than ever of the value of their data, not everyone is willing to give this up. There is a balance to be struck between exceptional experience and data privacy. If people understand how their data will be used, stored and how it will benefit them, they will be more likely to agree.

Legacy Construction and Retrofit Process

The traditional construction and procurement process is very rigid and historically set in stone. It is hard for new innovations to break through the complex supply chain and get their solutions specified.

Within the new build process, smart systems aren’t considered until the later stages, which stifles innovation and causes issues with interoperability.

A retrofit process often offers more opportunities for smart system specialists, but stakeholders typically only gain visibility of specifications after they have been filtered through multiple contract layers. The project manager will tend to go for “tried and tested” approaches that carry minimal risk.

There is a lack of the key skills needed to create smart buildings further up the chain. Smart building Consultants and System Integrators aren’t standard on every project, there is a need for people who have knowledge of networking, systems integration, data management and data security.

Without the contribution of appropriately skilled building automation and IoT specialists to the process, sub-optimal lowest cost options with limited interoperability are often selected.

Interoperability

Growing systems complexity and the interconnection of multiple data streams from building and business systems presents new challenges that few building operators are equipped to address.

Building systems on new build projects are often commissioned with little regard for overall systems interoperability or compliance, and there is little incentive for vendors providing each system to collaborate on systems integration if a dedicated smart systems consultant or systems integrator is part of the team.

However, open standards are now a lot more common; there is a steady progression from proprietary to open across the industry. Some challenges remain when it comes to integrating with legacy systems; however, this challenge will continue to ease over time as legacy systems are progressively replaced with modern IoT enabled systems based on open protocols.

Opportunities

Partnership and Collaboration

A Collaborative approach can lead to much improved results; it ensures that everyone understands the value of smart technology and how smart systems can be leveraged to deliver improved outcomes in terms of efficiency, sustainability, flexibility, connectivity, and occupant comfort.

Open standards provide more choice and flexibility throughout the supply chain, allowing the very best solutions to be created and executed. This also future proofs buildings as they are not locked into one supplier.

Health and Wellbeing

The pandemic has increased demand for occupancy analytics, air quality monitoring and control, remote management tools and contactless solutions which offer a means for building owners to better understand changing behaviours and patterns of utilisation. There is a focus on encouraging employees back to workplaces and offering them an experience they cannot get at home; it is essential that occupants feel safe. Businesses are also trying to encourage customers back e.g. shopping centres, leisure centres and entertainment venues such as theatres, therefore there is also pressure to instil trust and safety for the wider public too.

Prior to the pandemic, health and wellbeing were gaining some traction, but it has now been turbo-charged. Employees are often the most expensive asset within an organisation; prioritising their needs also increases productivity rates, happiness and retention. Therefore, although health and wellbeing are still viewed as secondary to cost-saving, really, the two go hand in hand. By making employees feel safe and looked after, businesses will save money on recruitment costs, sick days, and productivity will increase.  

Sustainability

The number one driver of smart buildings remains cost and energy saving. It is still the top of the agenda for business executives who have objectives to reduce facilities and operational costs. This is encouraging more businesses to adopt smart technologies that provide improved insight and reveal changes that can be made to not only save costs but also save energy. Of course, this is also being driven by Government initiatives to reach net carbon zero.

Buildings and their construction together account for 36% of global energy use and 39% of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions annually, according to the United Nations Environment Program. 80% of buildings in 2050 have already been built; therefore, it is essential we upgrade and future proof them, making them more sustainable.

In order to overcome these barriers and harness the opportunities within the market, a collaborative approach is essential. Phil Cross, CEO of amBX, states: As a forward-thinking smart lighting and building software company, we need to be aware of all of the challenges and opportunities within the market both for our own development but also to be able to smart enable other solutions and continue to improve the industry. To succeed, we need to work together. No one company can achieve truly smart buildings that address all of the internal and external requirements alone.