Tech and real estate appear the most awkward of partners. The difference in pace, people and purpose put them at odds, as many who have strived to upgrade the user experience in retail and office space have already found.
Yet the potential prizes of convergence are meaningful: the most obvious is the opportunity to create a seamless, outstanding and more productive experience for customers. The more profound prize tackling climate change – and we know that Proptech will be critical to our industry delivering its full potential in this shared challenge.
Fundamental to achieving these two material wins is the ability to gather, structure and analyse data. For example, to be able to create the most environmentally efficient places and most positive experiences for users, we need to understand in detail how those spaces are functioning in practice and be able to answer wider questions such as: what is the energy consumption of the M&E systems, which are the most popular retail units, or which systems are showing aberrant readings and could be close to failure. And the real insight comes from being able to combine these together, for example to optimise heating/cooling proactively in coordination with actual occupancy data – rather than having to wait for the room to get stuffy and only then respond.
Today this is difficult: operational technology such as building systems have different naming conventions and communicate in different – often locked-in – languages. This makes data integration very challenging, adding more cost and complexity today when we onboard systems into our data environment. And in time, multiple data and naming standards will make trading buildings in and out of a portfolio highly problematic.
How do we tackle this sleeping giant of an issue? We have worked with Arup to create a British Land standard for naming building IoT devices. And it became clear that many others were working on similar documents. British Land, Arup, Google and the Open Data Institute discussed this challenge, and have invited the industry to work with us over the next few months to agree a universal standard we can all adopt. Similar to the impact of the US supermarket industry agreeing in the 1970s to combine their multiple bar-codes into one system, agreeing a single way of describing building systems will reduce the amount of bespoke rework and software translation required when commissioning them and so accelerate their take-up. When you consider the urgency of the climate crisis, overcoming this fragmentation now could fast-track our industry’s improvement and be a significant part of the solution.
50 organisations joined our first meeting in December 2019. Around half said they had been working on an in-house naming convention, and everyone agreed that tearing down this Tower of Babel to create a single version would have significant positive impact.
Capitalising on this strong start, together we will explore existing naming structures and agree one that works for everyone in 2020. This will culminate in an open-sourced standard, with the Open Data Institute steering the process, and the community maintaining updates and changes.
This is our first step in driving a more strategic collaboration around data standards, and the sharing of benchmarking data across our industry. Together, we are creating a platform on which we can build to create places people prefer in the 21st century and the simple transparency we urgently need to alleviate climate change.