Smart Buildings Center relies heavily on advice from members of the industry to allow us to provide the most effective services to our “customers”. Regardless of whether that input is coming from a building owner, a building/construction services company, or an operator of a building, that knowledge is incredibly valuable. Fine tuning our products and services at our new SBC home in the Pacific Tower has been on our minds for a while now, so we organized a charrette. For those of you who aren’t fluent in French, a charrette is an intense, freewheeling discussion.
In an 8th Floor conference room in the Pacific Tower, a group of 15 or so facility directors, energy engineers, and product folks got together with SBC staff to share ideas and suggestions on how to best create value from core SBC services like tool lending and analytical tools.
Things got granular right away. How long can the tools be borrowed? How does the SBC ensure appropriate use of the tools by sufficiently qualified users? How does the reservation system work? We were glad to hear an extremely positive response from both building owner/operators and service providers on the basic concept of making diagnostic tools more generally available. The conversation really helped us both refine the list of tools we want to offer and to think through the mechanics of making the library work to best serve our community.
We then steered the conversation toward our other big SBC lift – creating a showcase for the opportunity when “Smart meets efficient”. New analytic and visualization tools are exploding on the market and our stakeholder group both showed excitement about them and expressed the need for better market information and education about what they are, what they do, and when and where they are most appropriate. We walked away from that discussion with pledges from industry folks to share product information and case study examples which can help us “curate” the SBC space for maximum effect.
The event was incredibly helpful and we are extremely grateful to the following folks for sharing their time and ideas:
Javad Maadanian
Bill Babbitt
Chris Olmsted
Gary Engleson
Darren Schwend
Ian Siadak
Ron Fues
Norm Menter
Jesse Sycuro
Moe Salem
Perry England
With the design help of SSL, McKinstry, and their subcontractors our space will be ready to support a wide variety of activities and events. We’re aiming to have several state of the art event spaces and conference rooms (which will be available to the building efficiency community) as well as office spaces, and of course room for our new 
