The Nexus Podcast

Latest Episodes:

🎧 #040: Jeremy Macdonald on sustainability, ESG, and where analytics fit Mar 04, 2021

Show notes

“The more time we spend going to answer a hot/cold call, the less time we spend taking care of key issues and making sure the facilities really runs right. And you can't send a person around fast enough to check all the things that your technology solution can check. It's just not even practical to think of all the different things… So there is a huge payback for every single person that tries to do monitoring-based commissioning. It hasn't really failed yet… Um, I'll go back on that. Failure points are if you do nothing with the data.”
–Jeremy Macdonald

My Highlights

Why buildings are so far behind: mixed up incentives (3:08)
ISS - facilities management and workplace experience, not to be confused with the International Space Station (4:19)
Intro to the world of FM / PM (9:29)
How money exchanges hands in different outsourcing scenarios (13:18)
ESG (28:58)
Thinking about waste and energy, hard engineering and soft services (32:35)
Waste tech (33:56)
How analytics fits in (41:02)
KPIs for outsourced facilities managers that analytics folks should be aware of (55:40)
Obstacles to rolling out analytics-based services, and strategies to overcome them (59:39)
Some things to look forward to in 2021 (1:01:50)

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🎧 #039: Adam Kaufman on the vital role of the analytics super user Feb 25, 2021

Show notes

“We've solved so many things where the engineering staff has been like, ‘I bet you this was going on for 10 years.’ It's been happening forever… whether that's a damper, whether the fans are running 24/7, whatever's broken. It's just really good at identifying things that would not otherwise be identified.”
—Adam Kaufman

My Highlights

Why this university decided to pursue analytics (5:30)
A history of software collecting dust on a virtual shelf (12:12)
Universities’ place on the analytics adoption curve (22:31)
Adams’s role as the super user Pt 1 (25:10)
Drivers of success (36:35)
Adams’s role as the super user Pt 2: the three workflow processes (39:18)
The importance of the verification process (48:59)
Baby stepping to other use cases (58:05)

You can find Adam Kaufman on LinkedIn.
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🎧 #038: Rajavel Subramanian on the 3 types of software silos and how the overlay helps Feb 18, 2021

Show notes

“Because that large scale technology transformation hasn’t happened, that’s probably the cause of outdated business models, lack of IT skillsets, lack of ownership of technology initiatives and leaving it to vendors, etc. It was once the same for other industries. I think the building owners themselves will be the champions of this change.”
–Rajavel Subramanian

My Highlights

why buildings are so far behind, and lessons learned from the paths taken by IT & telecom industries (4:05)
a brief refresher on the state of siloed software and the need for an overlay (10:09)
introduction to the overlay solution (17:28)
walking through the 5 categories of overlays: building, system, functional, data, and hybrid (19:29) and where Facilio’s solution fits in (31:57)
platform consolidation (35:54)
contextual integration (38:53)
customized user experiences (41:05)
Facilio’s plans for 2021 (45:13)

You can find Rajavel Subramanian on LinkedIn.
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🎧 #037: Shannon Smith on making analytics a painkiller, not a vitamin Feb 11, 2021

Show notes

“Every building owner is on their own path and it’s our job as an industry to meet them where they are on that path, not to yell at them from the end of the path, telling them that they're losers, if they're not over here.”
—Shannon Smith

My Highlights

How Shannon got sucked into BMS (2:59)
A ‘violent’ agreement with past answers to James’ favorite question + a unique take from Shannon’s finance perspective: debt mentality (6:55)
Drivers of change: talent drain, tenant focus, COVID (10:52)
Deep dive on PointGuard (12:26)
The state of the analytics industry (14:21)
The need for consolidation (22:10)
Vitamin to painkiller perspective (26:06)
Onboarding - the customers, and the buildings (34:13)
Analytics for service contracts (38:31)
Looking toward the future: analytics for COVID (41:40), what needs to be unlocked (44:43), and reasons for excitement in 2021 (45:19)

You can find Shannon Smith on LinkedIn.
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🎧 #036: Josh Adams on digital twins and partnerships (and why we need both) Feb 04, 2021

Show notes

“I think that leveraging both is incredibly important. You need the software to be modular enough to merge everything together. But you need a willingness for partnerships to then leverage the benefits that come out of that.”

—Josh Adams

My Highlights

A new answer to the new favorite question: partnerships (9:05)
What innovation looks like within the Big Four (13:49)
An alternative to disruption; service contracts as an opportunity to innovate (17:36)
Diving into Josh’s concept of digital twins, grounded in actual use cases (34:01)
Pebble’s operations-first approach (45:24)
Animated Insights’ perspective on open data and ontologies (57:56)
Something to be excited about in 2021: Biden’s infrastructure package (1:00:29)

You can find Josh Adams on LinkedIn.
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🎧 #035: Matt Golden on capturing the grid benefits of your projects Jan 28, 2021

Show notes

“This is like the moral compass to our industry, right? We're totally fixated on customer benefits and savings; and in order to pivot so we are also considering grid benefits and GHGs, we need to make them valuable, and this is how we do it…”
—Matt Golden

My Highlights

Diving into the ‘old world’ of utility incentives (8:51)
Introducing the new model of mutual benefits (11:31)
The struggle for standardized methods (17:00)
The challenge of EM&V during COVID (29:19)
Defining the buzzwords: virtual power plants (49:15), grid interactive buildings (51:06)
Matt shares his unique perspective on James’ favorite question: competitive market access (54:37)
Sources of excitement in 2021: The Year of the Virtual Power Plant (56:30)

You can find Matt Golden on LinkedIn.
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🎧 #034: Brian Turner on the Ontology Wars and the role of the MSI Jan 21, 2021

Show notes

"We can’t try to bring them all [ontologies] together. We can’t make them all one. What we need to do is really focus on delivering the outcomes and delivering the use cases, and then have data engineers worry about how to normalize that data. Because at the end of the day, the ontology doesn't deliver any outcome. It only enables, right? It's not an outcome.”
–Brian Turner

My Highlights

New year, new favorite question (5:17)
Digging into Buildings IOT’s offerings: the ontology alignment project (OAP), JetStream, onPoint (8:41)
What the domain-specific API is missing (19:21)
How to ensure the independent data layer accommodates the client’s use cases (21:24)
The need and (lack of?) demand for supervisory control, and the problems with reinventing the wheel for fairly consistent use cases (24:20)
Brian’s perspective on the state of the industry as it relates to data modeling: the Ontology Wars (32:59)
The concept of the ‘decoder ring,’ and the challenges of industry-wide collaboration (35:59)
Deep dive into what an master systems integrator (MSI) is/does, and the fundamental problem with the industry in Brian’s view: conflicts of interest (45:01)
Something to be excited about in 2021 (1:01:16)

You can find Brian Turner on LinkedIn.
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🎧 #033: Ping Yao on smart building networks and the blurring lines between IT and OT Jan 14, 2021

Show notes

"It's not a technology question. It's not a performance problem. It's a people problem. If a new building is being built… and the owner says, “I want my OT system, security cameras, lighting, elevators… etc. to be on my IT network,” the simple question to ask is: is IT now going to be responsile for the construction phase and all the responsibilities of OT? "
—Ping Yao

My Highlights

Ping explains the impetus for founding Optigo Networks (1:49)
Answer to James’ favorite question (8:28)
The average building network (10:38)
Intro to IT vs OT, blurred lines (13:30)
Diving into Optigo’s services, how they’ve evolved, and where they’re headed (19:27)
Top three problems with BACnet (30:37)
Back to the world of IT and OT (39:53)
Understanding silos from a networking perspective, looking at industry trends (47:14)
Reflecting on how to close the skills gaps in the industry (51:05)

You can find Ping Yao on LinkedIn.
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🎧 #032: Erik Ubels' insights from The Edge Jan 07, 2021

Show notes

"If there’s one thing that makes the success of a smart building, it is the combination of real estate, facilities, IT, hospitality, all those people in one organization that basically report to [the same person]… [And] if these people understand that they’re not building this building for themselves, but for the future employees of their company, then that makes a lot of difference.”
—Erik Ubels

My Highlights

Erik answers James’ favorite question: industry fragmentation, cost-cutting, and passing the buck (6:38)
And the key drivers of change/progress on this front (8:50)
Unpacking Erik’s experience developing The Edge, with the desire to attract talent driving the journey (11:30)
Advice to other smart building champions (20:37)
Points of pride: sustainability, and the connected, quiet environment (22:29)
Mistakes made: the app (26:49)
Experience with Microsoft technology in the development of The Edge, and Erik’s perspective on IT/OT (30:06)
Erik calls out the inevitable end of BACnet (35:59)
And other forward-looking trends in the smart building space (39:39)

You can find Erik Ubels on LinkedIn.

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🎧 #031: Why technology in buildings is decades behind Dec 17, 2020

Show notes

“You built a building 25 years ago, and the stuff you put in there, it’s still there.”
-Keith Berkoben of Google

"For consumer facing technology, you know, people talk about the market working in all kinds of mysterious ways, but if you don't have a feedback path, the market doesn't work.”

- Andrew Rodgers of ACE IoT

“So you have this fundamental difference of perspective, where the people who ran the companies saw technology is a risk and a cost. And then you had the markets saying, well, I'm not going to go into that market and develop anything technological, because I can't get enough uptake. And between that and the .com bust…”

- Joe Gaspardone of Montgomery Technologies

“So you need this IT/OT hybrid skillset that really a lot of organizations just don’t have today.”

-Kyle Tooke of ThoughtWire

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