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“My 80/20 rule is that it's 20% of technology—and there are a lot of technologies in a smart building. And it's 80% about people and human engineering."
—Bruce Duyshart
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Episode 115 is a conversation with Bruce Duyshart, founder and Director of Meld Strategies, a Smart Building Consultancy based in Sydney Australia.
In this discussion, we'll unpack the role of a Smart Building Consultant and the process of running and managing a Smart Building project and the human side of what it takes to create a successful project.
Without further ado, please enjoy the Nexus podcast with Bruce Duyshart.
You can find Bruce on LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
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Music credit: Dream Big by Audiobinger—licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
[00:00:03] James Dice: hello friends, welcome to the nexus podcast. I'm your host James dice each week. I fire questions that the leaders of the smart buildings industry to try to figure out where we're headed and how we can get there faster without all the marketing fluff. I'm pushing my learning to the limit. And I'm so glad to have you here following along.
[00:00:31] James Dice: This episode is a conversation with Bruce dice, sharp founder and director of meld strategies, a smart building consultancy based in Sydney, Australia. And this discussion, we unpack the role of a smart building consultant and the process of running and managing a smart building project and the human side of what it takes to create a successful project.
So without further ado, please enjoy the nexus podcast with Bruce Disert. Hey, Bruce. Welcome to the show. Can you introduce yourself?
[00:00:57] Bruce Duyshart: Hi James. Um, my name is, uh, Bruce [00:01:00] ARD and I'm the, uh, founder and principal of strategies. We're consultancy based in Sydney, in Australia. All
[00:01:08] James Dice: right. Start with background
[00:01:11] Bruce Duyshart: way back for me, way back. Yeah, way back. Well, I guess my way back point of difference, uh, is that I'm actually an architect by training.
So I started out, uh, being trained as a, as an architect, um, all the way, uh, uh, back in the, uh, in the eighties. And, uh, so a computer, a bachelor of planning and design did a batch of architecture in. Um, and, um, yeah, it was, it was a long haul. It was, um, I just very sort of intense degree and you spend a lot of time in the one building, whatever.
So a lot of camaraderie goes out that, and you, you basically outta that, you, you learn about problem solving. It's probably the biggest sort of takeout from all of that. And, uh, when, uh, I graduated, there was this [00:02:00] massive, massive recession in the industry. So pretty much every single one of us did not have a job.
But, uh, being me, I was one of the nerds during university that actually got into computer design the very early days. So I think one of the very earliest IBM PCs, some of the various earliest versions of AutoCAD that you could possibly imagine. And, uh, after having been chastised for having used, you know, the audacity to have used a computer doing my architectural degree and not doing anything with, you know, uh, lines and over apple lines and so forth, uh, found ourself in a position where we were setting up a summer school to teach architects who were out of work, how to use this new technology thing in computer design.
And, uh, one thing led to another and the professor of the university love what we were doing is that, you know, keep going and it was meant to be just a. A two week thing and people just kept on enrolling and we had to start from scratch. We even setting this thing up, we had to build a network. We had to write courseware.
We had to do all these training materials. We had to teach and lecture, which we'd never done before. Um, [00:03:00] and one thing led to another and two weeks turned into two months, which eventually turned into a job offer and suddenly we were employed. And, um, yeah, we had a, a stable job with income at the worst possible time and learning about new technology and, and the birth of the internet, literally and learning all these different things, uh, about every type of, you know, things like, uh, you know, FTP and gofer and really early internet sort of weird stuff before even the worldwide web came about.
So it was a great introduction, forced fed, um, regarding technology and so forth. So, uh, I was lecturing at Melbourne university in design, so I established the first teaching course there in cap design for people. Uh, I completed my master's, um, in digital documents. There. So I got deep into understanding what's the purpose of the document?
Um, what are the digital equivalent of it? How's it all work? So then sort of figured all the nuts and bolts of, of, of all that. Um, and then, uh, I worked in various different sort of architectural practices as well doing, you know, [00:04:00] uh, that sort of stuff for fathers and architect as well. Um, and then I got picked up by, uh, by Lendlease to kind of work on a, on a project there.
So doing this technology things and helping them do remote working and, uh, using video conferencing to communicate to remote sites and things like that. Um, and, uh, and of course the project then went into a, into, into a, also the projects on, on hold. And another kinda mini recession was beginning to happen.
It was like, great. This keeps on happening to me. and they then said, look, uh, come, come up to Sydney though. I was based outta Melbourne at the time. So come up to Sydney. And, uh, because we believe the skills that you have are just too important to the organization to, just to let go. So come up there. So had to re sorts of different things.
So you, I, up for years, so through various different roles, doing project management technology, the design group there, I headed in a business group, uh, it project director, various different projects, [00:05:00] you know, did all the technology for our, uh, new head office, which was the first five star green star, uh, building in Australia.
So got into all the, you know, the. The, the physical operational technology and it components of that fit out technologies and so forth. Um, that then gave me the unable task of, of, um, establishing and setting up the project management office, which then turned into a global role. So next minute, having to manage guys and work with other guys in different regions, uh, in Australia, UK, us to, um, establish, you know, doing project management properly across all these it projects and sort of, I'll sort of completely up to, to here world all of that.
Um, and that went up for 16 years. And so I did, you know, major projects like the technology master plan for Barangaroo, which is a 6 billion sort of, um, waterfront product in, in Sydney that was, uh, you know, very sort of large and sort of complex. And it was something like, uh, I think the time I left it was about 26 different versions of, of a master plan that was going on there for [00:06:00] the, for the whole precinct.
That was pretty hectic, but I'd worked across the whole of Australia, every single asset class. You could possibly imagine, you know, residential retail, you know, commercial property, master plan precincts, you know, getting, uh, fiber to the premise, uh, sort of technology Jeep on some technology for master plan communities, you know, three years ahead of a national rollout of the same technology.
So pretty much historically over my career, I've been at the, at the bleeding edge of, of technology and new emerging technologies have actually come. And then nine years ago, established Mel strategies. And so, um, you know, had a vision then to establish, um, a consulting business around creating smart buildings.
At a point, everyone was going what the hell's a smart building, which was a very, very interesting prospect, cuz it hadn't quite settled at that particular point. People going, oh, is it intelligent building? Is it a mm-hmm I dunno what it is, you know? And then what's the definition of a smart building. And then you, you just you'd read these [00:07:00] definitions that go on for, for pages.
It's like you're falling asleep halfway through the definition and going, I, you get the clear things. So I wrote a book, right? So I kind of basically unpacked my brain from everything I had learned over my career to that point. Ah, there you
[00:07:21] James Dice: audio, I just out Bruce's book, smarter buildings, better experiences, beautiful yellow cover.
[00:07:27] Bruce Duyshart: Yeah, there you go. So that was me unpacking my brain as to how does one go about creating smart building when not actually at that point, having yet created a smart building from start to finish in it, completeness, you know, done elements of, and done ICS and IP backbones, all the different bits, but sort of collectively having a process by which you can actually create a smart building, requires a considerable amount of thought.
And so for me, the process of writing a book was an ability to actually concentrate [00:08:00] on a topic for the first time and say, how, how, how should one actually go about doing this? And so as I began to piece it all together and go, right, this has to be on there. So knowing. Know, all of the human engineering, uh, discovery, you know, planning, uh, brainstorming, blue sky planning, all those sort of things, you know, cost planning, et cetera, all the stuff that I have learnt over my career, how to do this.
I had to put together a formulate into, into a plan, which basically says here is the as, as he, uh, like to call in the us or in some parts, uh, the whole thing from soup to nuts, from start to finish as to how it all comes together. So that's kind of the background of, of, of, uh, so now have established Mel strategies and we specialize just in credit smart building.
So we're not an engineering firm, we're not an MSI. We basically help our clients who are property developers. And we work with design professionals. We work with builders and, and so forth to help them [00:09:00] realize a vision, uh, and a strategy for creating a smart building, helping to find what actually it is.
And, and, and just going through that whole process and steering everything out there. So there's a guiding hand throughout the whole process. Got
[00:09:13] James Dice: it, got it. Yeah, the story, the background, the reason I have this is because I, when I was creating our foundations course, I was kind of like you where I was like, I'm still learning this in a way, but I'm also, I haven't put all these pieces together.
And so it was like, I put together my outline and then I read your book and I was like, okay, we're, we're, we're along the same lines in most, in most parts of your book, it maps pretty well to, that's how we teach smart buildings in our foundations course. Um,
[00:09:43] Bruce Duyshart: yeah.
[00:09:44] James Dice: So that's that, that was fun. So thank you for that.
Yeah. Helping, helping create
[00:09:47] Bruce Duyshart: that. Oh, pleasure. I mean, I mean the, I, I mean, probably like yourself, I mean, I was in writing a book and going well at that point, I think there's about. Two other books, I think [00:10:00] around at the time that actually think, think Jim monopoly had one. And so use that one too. They're quite, yeah.
Quite technical, right? Yeah. So you look at this thing going well written for engineers, right? So I was going, okay, well, how do we make this accessible? Just like your podcast is right. So you are saying, okay, how do we translate this in a way that actually enables a greater majority of people to actually understand what the hell concepts are.
So weird stuff like, you know, I'd been in meetings where people are going, we're talking about IP the other minute, someone ears up and get the involved. Here's like, yeah, that's TCP. It's something else. It was like, you know, people just didn't understand the fundamentals, you know, things like bandwidth or just basic, basic, basic.
And then even when I started researching it, man, what what's illustration that, that shows you what, what is bandwidth, right? Yeah. And it's. Perplexing as to why some [00:11:00] basic concepts aren't even illustrator explained to people. Yeah. In layman's terms, in a way that helps 'em to understand. So I congratulate you on your podcast and helping to sort of UN unpack these sorts of topics to help explain to people.
Thanks. What's going on here. Thanks. And I had
[00:11:14] James Dice: a, um, actually a similar college experience too. So I graduated in 2010, so I don't know what financial crisis you were a part of, but mine was the global, global financial
[00:11:25] Bruce Duyshart: crisis. Oh, crisis. Yeah, that was when I
[00:11:27] James Dice: graduated and, and I was still able to find a job.
But at that point, for me, it was similar to you. Like you became an expert in CAD, which was a little early. I became an expert in energy modeling and that really helped me. Right. Um, I, I learned it in college as an intern. And then, you know, took that into the workforce. When a bunch of mechanical engineers knew a ton about HVAC.
They didn't know. Anything about how to produce an energy
[00:11:49] Bruce Duyshart: model. So, anyway, yeah.
[00:11:51] James Dice: It's funny how you, you use technology to kind of find jobs in hard
[00:11:55] Bruce Duyshart: times. That's, that's it, you know, outta lemons. [00:12:00] Exactly. There's a
[00:12:01] James Dice: part of your background though, that doesn't make sense to me. So you were an architect by training, you learn CAD, but then all of a sudden you'd had this it job.
So how'd you learn the it side of.
[00:12:11] Bruce Duyshart: Um, well out of necessity again. So, um, through setting up, for example, the networking side of the, of the network for the computer training course, somehow we got involved in helping set up the network for the whole in the faculty building. So, you know, that point there was that side of things.
I got involved in doing the programming stuff. So I train myself on how to, uh, program in, in order list and, and things like that. Designing web pages. So coding on that side. So there was a coding aspect to it. There was a networking aspect to it. And then bit by bit, you begin to build up and what's going on around you.
And remember, cause it's early days, you know, everything sort of new and everyone's going all right. Hey, did you know that you can just click on something here and next minute you are over an MIT and you can browse through this directory thing over there and look in all these [00:13:00] folders and see stuff was going on.
It's like, you know, mind blown. And of course you then dig and dig and dig and saying, how's that work? And you know, how's how. You know, how's it happen? So I think, you know, have an inquisitive mind to understand how things actually work, as opposed to theory of it is, is, is essential to an innovator and understanding where, where can go next and then reading where things are going and just educating.
[00:13:24] James Dice: Yeah, absolutely all. So tell me more about, um, meld. So can you talk about some of the key projects you guys work on right now? Like what types of projects, what types of buildings, what types of clients do you.
[00:13:38] Bruce Duyshart: Yes. So, uh, look, I mean, starting off with the team, you gotta have a good team to, to, to, to begin with, right?
So again, you know, you need people that actually have experience and we, we have a, a range of people with large different sort of, you know, background and so forth, some through sort of the architectural sort of, you know, path there as well. Um, project management, um, you know, in a range of different areas [00:14:00] as well.
Um, people who worked on building control systems and, um, you know, electrical engineers, solar engineers, you know, all that sort of stuff there builds up a team whereby we actually understand how these things work. Right. So, um, and, uh, it's really important to have a, a team with capability that has the experience enough to know how to go about, you know, you know, doing this.
Yep. Mm-hmm so the projects we get involved in are, uh, commercial office, uh, building sort of, you know, starting from, from scratch, new builds, um, And, um, that starts our process from the very beginning sort of end to end. Um, there's, uh, different types of refurbishment projects that come up from time to time where asset owners looking to say, well, what else can we do?
Because obviously it becomes a bit of a comparison game, um, and times, and people are going okay, well, we've seen these new buildings have these features around what they're doing in their lobby regarding visitor management, for example, or, um, just simply getting an IP backbone in the building, [00:15:00] um, you know, um, or having dashboards in the building, um, or improving the vendor facilities.
So you need, um, you know, smart lockers in there, things like that. So refurbishment projects bring around a lot of the attributes, more so on the, um, occupant facing technologies. Yeah. Um, and, uh, workplace things. So COVID has been a, I guess, a massive, um, Uh, catalyst for introducing a new range of technologies.
And I found that throughout my career, um, as, as well, when times get tough actually weirdly or fortuitously people actually turn to technology as a potential solution. So you need to differentiate yourself on the market. You need to actually use technology to increase efficiency and performance of, of, of buildings and, and things at workplaces and, and so forth.
And so, um, yeah, so people do focus on te and we definitely saw that throughout, uh, where people are going, right? What are we gonna do here to help facilitate [00:16:00] return to work? So we've got, uh, lots of projects where we have been working with clients. Uh, nationally across their portfolio, uh, helping them understand how do we improve workplace environments and the use of technologies in that workplace, but then surprise, surprise.
How does that workplace environment integrate with the base building, um, and, and work around areas such as security and so forth. So that to improve that user experience of coming into the building or working there after hours or number of people coming in etcetera. So pretty diverse and across commercial office buildings, uh, mixed use, uh, uh, retail, um, residential, multi multiunit, residential build to rent, things like
[00:16:43] James Dice: that.
Yeah. Yeah. And so it seems like looking at some of your work and the projects you've worked on, which we're gonna talk about a little bit later in more detail. Sure. But I just wanted to ask you this upfront. Yeah. Um, It seems like you have a similar mindset to a lot of the writing I've been doing [00:17:00] recently around the horizontal architecture.
It seems like, like you just said integrating with the base building. Right. So there's the base building, which is the device layer and it seems like everything you do or everything you've done recently has some sort of converged network
[00:17:14] Bruce Duyshart: happening. Yes. And then sort of,
[00:17:17] James Dice: yeah. And then some sort of data platform on top.
I can't remember what you call it and then some sort of application layer at the top. Is that kind of your, your
[00:17:26] Bruce Duyshart: mindset that's that's, that's pretty much the architecture. Yeah. Yes, because basically the, the simple principle is that the, the control systems at the bottom end of that layer, the operational technology is, are really your best of breed systems.
Right? So they're your access control, lighting control, lift control, you know, et cetera. Yeah. Obviously all these systems over time need to connect to an IP network. Right. So that's your well. In, in the states, you call it a converge network. Um, uh, or we call it, um, an integrated communications network or an ICN, um, [00:18:00] principles, the, the same, however, the subtle, the, um, and it sort of reinforced, uh, with me when I went to the, um, Igon conference, you know, recently is that converge network terminology, uh, has come about because there's more owner-occupied assets in the states, thereby you've got it.
And operational technologies coexisting on the one network. So you might have a, an entire building, for example, that's owned by Adobe or, um, you know, so they, they own the building and they're the tenant in there. So. The economy of scale is put in on the one network, which on paper looks good, right? In Australia, we freak out that concept because really these two things should be air gap from each other, because otherwise you you're basically putting yourself in front of a whole range of cybersecurity, you know, issues on, on that front, on there.
So you've got sensitive potentially, you know, um, commercial and confident, you know, information or identifiable [00:19:00] information, blah, blah, blah. Right. All all, okay. Going, going up the same network. Right. And that's only gonna be as good as the weakest link in the chain. Right. So that can go complex very, very quickly.
So we we'd like to prefer to keep those things separately. Uh, and then that independent data layer on top, which you're talking about, which is sort of changing in shape and size and, and so forth there. And then a presentation layer on top of all of that, mm-hmm, that architecture brings about a flexibility.
To choose the best of breed right. Of what's going around. And, and, um, you know, what I've learned over my career, as much as you'd like to think the last building is just like the next building, E E every building more or less is a prototype mm-hmm because you're not stamping out exactly the same building every single time.
Even if it's stage one, stage two is stage three of a, you know, three building, uh, precinct, for example, it is likely that over the course of those projects, things will inevitably change. So things will change and in changes of [00:20:00] technology or. Have happened because of procurement processes or the design team has changed slightly or the construction team slightly different or other, other types of things.
So as much as you would hope that this is just a infinitely, repeatable exactly the same process. Mm-hmm every building ends up more or less having some unique characteristics, which requires the handhold, which is kind of the service we provide to our customers to help them steer their way through totally understanding how to, how to achieve the best possible outcome.
Under the circumstances with the budget. They've got looking at the risk profile I have for the project. Got it. Before we get
[00:20:39] James Dice: to the handhold, I'd love to hear just how so you've been doing this for nine years. Yeah. How is that data layer that independent data layer? How has that piece of the puzzle changed throughout those nine years?
[00:20:52] Bruce Duyshart: let's just say it's a work in progress. I mean, this it's it's. [00:21:00] It's both overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time, the progress that has been made. Right? I mean, you, you've sort of had this under the microscope many times on your, on your podcast. And, um, everyone just hones in on the BMS, I think mainly cuz everyone that's the background that they had.
And, and here we are in 2022, whatever's going, there is no complete set of data tags or the what's the right ontology, blah, blah, blah, to, you know, help explain. What's just in that environment, let alone go down the, all the others mm-hmm to all the other stuff there as well. And, and soon as you head past your traditional kind of, you know, lift sliding control access, etcetera, you know, the.
The mine goes blank and the whiteboard goes up and they're going, I dunno, what are we gonna call these data points? That's coming outta our car, our car park management system, for example, right.
You know, what discipline does that [00:22:00] even fall under? Um, and you know, there's a lot of, you know, areas there that have yet to be fully, um, resolved, but look, the principles are all the same. Yeah. And, and at the end of the day, there has to be just clear communication around how does what your approach actually is.
And there has to be well documented and understood and communicated and so forth. And, um, I guess out of frustration, a lot of organizations have gone. Okay, well, look, we're gonna have to start just developing our own standards around. Trying to comply as much as possible possible with emerging and evolving standards, but at least getting that line, the standards documented that says, okay, next job.
Here's where we, we last left off and it should be sort of blamed like this mm-hmm consistency and documentation is, is key so that the next person picking it up or the other person on that project and understand what the hell's actually going
Che
really[00:23:00]
[00:23:05] James Dice: role
[00:23:09] Bruce Duyshart: to
[00:23:09] James Dice: start with that topic would be your definition. So you mentioned earlier, there's, you know, these definitions end up looking like books and fall asleep before you get to the end of 'em. How, how do you guys define what a, what a smart
[00:23:23] Bruce Duyshart: building is smart building is. Okay. Right. So this is one of the things I had to do in my, in my book as well.
And even then I've done a sort of tweaks, you know, to it. So we've defined a smart building as a building that's safer, healthier, more comfortable, resilient, and productive, uh, building for its occupants. And we operationally efficient one for its owners through its lifecycle. And the key thing there we emphasize is the life cycle aspect of it.
Right? It's it's thinking beyond the defect liability, as you know, sort of say you, a lot of buildings are designed to the defect liability and see a right. So builders [00:24:00] aren't, uh, encumbered with the operational expense of running a building, for example. So as much as they will fulfill the requirements to make it.
You know, lead gold, lead platinum, green star, whatever sort of rating type of building, understanding how to continuously improve the performance of the building in order to lower energy consumption or lower operational costs really is not a part of their KPIs of the thinking in delivering the building.
Right. So it's really important to, um, understand that the drivers that sit, um, behind that and how one can actually achieve, you know, those outcomes.
[00:24:38] James Dice: Yeah. OK. Hey guys, just another quick note from our sponsor Nexus labs. And then we'll get back to the show. This episode is brought to you by nexus foundations, our introductory course on the smart buildings industry. If you're new to the industry, this course is for you. If you're an industry vet, but want to understand how technology is changing things.
This course is also for you. The alumni are raving [00:25:00] about the content, which they say pulls it all together, and they also love getting to meet the other students on the weekly zoom calls and in the private chat room, you can find out more about the course@courses.nexus lab. Start online. All right, back to the interview
OK. So now talk about the, the role, like the role you play to like, make that happen.
[00:25:20] Bruce Duyshart: Right? So it starts off with the, with the strategy side of things and really helping, uh, You know, the client understand what is it, what is the outcome that they're actually, you know, looking for?
And most of the time, they don't really understand necessarily what that, that, that is right. Mm-hmm um, so they've heard about it. Um, look, the analogy I give is, is always, it's a bit like when green buildings first came about, right? So when green buildings first came out of our own life, great concept makes sense.
When it could be more environmentally sustainable let's let's start making green buildings pause. What does that actually [00:26:00] mean? what does that mean? You know, and then sort of the girls and going, OK. What is a green building? Good point. Okay. And then as you begin to unpack that people have realized, okay, it's a holistic design process.
It is, it affects everything. It affects the materiality of the building. It affects, um, you know, the, the, the way you measure the building, you know, all the sustainable sort of principles have to, and, and they apply to mechanical electrical, hydraulic lift, know cetera, cetera, right? Mm-hmm, all the way down ultimately to sort of, you know, workplace environments, cetera, depending on what you are doing.
And they're always is that separation between core and shell and tendency as well. Now, one forward, um, that's the same with technology and smart building. So the strategy part of it really is being sort of understanding, you know, what is the outcomes you are looking for depending upon. Stakeholders that you're trying to appeal to.
I mean, is, is this something that's really being driven yeah. By the facilities managers or is it something that's been driven [00:27:00] by, uh, you know, leasing and tenants, you know, is it something that's been driven by sustainability? Is it being, and, and the reality is it's more than likely going to be a combination of all those different stakeholders.
Yeah. So that right. So really is to be on what the outcomes what's in for me
a do bank. Yeah. So understanding what those, those, um, questions actually are and what are the outcomes you're trying to achieve. And how's that gonna actually work is, is critical sort of steering through that, that strategy process to help articulate a clear vision around the outcomes to, to, to be achieved.
Yeah,
[00:27:49] James Dice: it sounds like a lot of it is, is human engagement. Can you, can you talk about this 80
20
[00:27:54] Bruce Duyshart: rule that you have? Oh yeah. So my 80 80 20 rule is, is, [00:28:00] um, pretty much that it's 20% about technology and there are a lot of technologies in building. So we would see probably anywhere from 25 to 40 different sort of technologies or technology touchpoints in a building involved in a smart building.
Um, and it's about people and human engineering, right? So what I've learned over over many years is that all the way from the beginning through to the end, funny enough, there's people involved and they all have different. They all go about thinking about and using technology, different ways. Some people.
Want to be there and are proactive and assertive and don't really care how it actually happens, but they've got a vision to say, I want this to happen. Right. So they're kinda your early adopter, their crowd, early majority. Then there's got people who are sitting on the right they're majority and they just going, I guess.
So, um, and then you got the guys there just do not wanna be there, right? Yeah. And it's like until there's some sort of evidence and they're, they're the guys that are gonna be prodding [00:29:00] and they're gonna be saying, well, prove to me the ROI, you know, why, why should we be putting these things in here?
Showing me the evidence that says that this has been successfully done before across five different buildings, right. Uh, etcetera, you know, and if we'd adopted that same mindset, we'd probably still be going around in a Paulson card still, um, you know, et cetera. So really. Being able to read the room, understand those different value propositions, understanding what represents value to the person who's actually going well, why should we do this?
Right. Knowing, so every now and again, still to this day, you'll have someone saying, so why are we using an IP network? Do that seriously? You know, this is 20 and you still have sometimes people going well, why? Right. It doesn't. Cause they never sat down enough to sort of think about why and, and mm-hmm then going, oh my God.
OK. Right. Let cast my mind back 20 years ago when I was being asked the same thing and what was the, what was the [00:30:00] rationale that one could use to do that? And that's, that was something that I had to do on the Barangaroo project, for example. Yeah. We're I saying we have an ICN in every building, right. So here's a 6 billion precinct trying and go, why, why are we doing an ICN since the builder?
Like, right. Okay. So how much should we spend? How much do we spend on cabling? For example. And I'm asking this question to, you know, 30 year veteran cost planning, estimators, right here we going, of course we, uh, and then pregnant pause. The reality is they didn't know the answer. They didn't know how much money was actually spent on cabling.
Why? Because they know that there's an electrical package. Yeah. And with an electrical package, there's a security package. Yeah. They know that there's cabling associated with it, but they don't understand the real cost associated with it. Right. Because they haven't unpacked it enough because they just look at a cost per square meter rate and they say, that's it.
Right. And as [00:31:00] you and I both know, you can't estimate the cost of a. On a cost per square meter rate because technology's elemental. Right. And, uh, so taking people through that process to say, okay, well you can actually save money using us. Yeah. And I had to go back to first principles and say, okay, how much a cost for linearal meter for cabling and trays and coordination and blah, blah, blah.
And then we, we, you know, eventually came up with a number that was just unbelievably massive, right? And the millions and millions of dollars of savings that could be made just through simply dematerialization of cabling to arrive at one common IP infrastructure, et cetera. But that was the evidence. A certain element of, of, you know, of, of the industry required in order of them to make the next step logically that says, okay, accept.
Now, the fact that that having a common converged IP network actually is more efficient and will save us money on this particular project. But unless you're prepared to some [00:32:00] cases go through that behavioral change process and provide the evidence, you sometimes are gonna get a lot of, no on things, but it's kinda, the experience is knowing.
What direction people are actually sort of pushing in or likely to behave and knowing when is the timely information they'll need in order to help them make decisions around different things, right. They're hearing feedback for, from leasing agents that, yes, that would be useful thing to have in the building.
We here is feedback about the importance of sorts of things, and then trip facilities, you know, and so forth. And the other aspect of it really is, um, understanding how buildings actually operate and work, uh, and, and so forth. And having that, you know, that human experience about operationally, how that works could then lead into the business process.
And then the technology importantly, that drives all of that and actually can support that outcome on there. So we don't like doing. Technology for technology's sake. So it has to be driven by a, uh, you know, a business [00:33:00] need for doing it. And, um, that 80, 20 rule, you know, you need to be prepared to do the hards and that's where the experience comes in because you've been there before.
You've seen it before you've seen the pushback, you know, what goes wrong in the field? Um, you know, it actually works enough to help guide and facilitate people based upon the experience to, to make things happen. Yeah, totally. And the bigger pitch of all of that is that if, if, if that process is not facilitated, things tend to fall down mm-hmm and the process of, of concept design or detail design or construction operates, the handover can fall over.
And if one part of that falls over on the way, then guess what technology falls under the bus and, and then, you know, the headline reads. Oh, this whole thing is stupid. You know, technology hasn't worked, which bit are all of it. Oh,
actually what the they're talking about, which part of it. [00:34:00] Right. So, you know, weakest link in the chain, particularly when this is all new and experiences there and everyone learning curve is, is, is hard. Right? So you need to learn to expect the issues to come about and how to deal with that. Yeah. Type of thing, behaviorally.
Yep. Totally. This
[00:34:18] James Dice: is all very validating to me because
our, our course that we, you know,
developed with, with the help of your book, but with a lot of other input as well, but it's very validating because if there's been one criticism of it from students, it's that you didn't quite get into AI or you didn't quite get into digital twins enough at like, I, I wanted to go deeper into technology, but.
What I've, what we've created it around is like every week is kind of like 80, 20 every, every week. Like it's basically engaging stakeholders, um, developing out use cases, which means engaging with people, uh, that are actually out there doing things and [00:35:00] buildings, um, engaging with integrators and understanding what needs to happen in existing systems to enable new new technologies, um, engaging with the supply chain and the vendors out there to understand what technologies are capable of.
Right. Um, yes. Yes. Engaging with financial stakeholders to understand how this use case makes an impact in someone's business. Right. Uh, and then finally we do week six, which is, um, all about careers and all about like all the companies that are in our industry. Like if you're gonna get a job in smart building, Like, what are the types of companies?
What, the types of roles. So if you think about that, what I just
said, like that's all people
[00:35:43] Bruce Duyshart: 100s not to be underestimated and, and just sort of picking up your point there that you made about digital twins and AI, right? I mean, that's sort of out there at the age, which is sort of, you know, six stand black belt stuff, right. right. I mean, some, some people go, oh, well, that's really [00:36:00] easy, you know, you know, you should be doing that and why to do, but look, unless you have the fundamentals, right.
Unless you have the foundations, right. Unless you've actually got people confident on the basics of there. Why the hell are you trying? I mean, you know how hard it's just trying to pull data out a building. Yeah. Redline pulled out of a building and connected to a high resolution, you know, 500 O D BI model thing that you're expecting somehow this next generation black belt facilities manager is gonna run and operate and lead and go, yeah, I'm totally good with that, actually.
That why of thing, right? It's just not a reality. Our industry now it is appropriate to some industries and some sectors and some asset owners might prepared to go there cuz they're prepared to invest the time and the skills and the resourcing and the, you know, are prepared to that on the chin. But you know, when you, when you're looking at the, uh, the, the, you know, a baseline capability, um, you gotta get some, you know, some, [00:37:00] some, you know, runs on the runs on the board.
First of all, before we can actually begin to progress that particular level. And for example, in our work, we would much rather you use less technology and implement it well than attempt something, which is so far out there. And as a significantly higher potential to. Yeah, thus put it, throwing everything under the bus, thus the potential for someone to be saying, aha, I told you, so, you know, why have we spent all this money trying to implement something that couldn't be implemented with the skillset we've got.
Right. Because it's even a bit of a leap of faith, assuming somehow that the builder is gonna be capable. Yeah. In a, in the sort of environment, we, we all sort of face globally to be able to pull this off. Right. So it requires. Lot of dedication just in the best of times that alone, assuming the market will kind of figure this out, you know?
Yeah. So it says the hope so says the hopeful specification, people just lying around going, oh, great. Another AI driven [00:38:00] building has just turned up. Right. So mm-hmm, awesome. Yeah. So yeah, a lot of persistence
and, and just to be clear, like obviously I love all of the cutting edge technologies. I'm
sure you did
[00:38:11] James Dice: too.
I could just go deep into it all day, but it's important to then point out that you have prerequisites. To getting to that cutting edge that you must, you must
[00:38:22] Bruce Duyshart: block through. I mean, think of it like a building, right? You can't just build 50 stories on sand, right? You gotta have foundations, you gotta have the fundamentals there in the first place you gotta have, you know, the cyber secure, rigorous, um, you know, ICN there from a network communications perspective, you need the high speed, you know, symmetrical internet services, connecting to that building.
You need the data layer properly organized, properly tagged, properly structured. You need a presentation layer. That's gonna be intuitive and easy to, to, to understand with multiple stakeholders you need, you know, these sorts of things as foundations is your starting point, [00:39:00] right? Mm-hmm before you then go, well, what's the next level.
And you can always come back and improve things. After the fact you get those foundations. Right. But if you haven't got them right, then you've just got this veneer of an approach. I mean, part of this is I call it manager by airline magazine, right. Is where, where people come in with this, you know, great idea.
It is like, oh, I've just read that. So, and so is doing a digital twin. We need to be doing digital twins, like. Uh, we haven't even done our first smart building. We haven't done our, you know, anything yet. We don't even, you know, baby stamps haven't done anything at all, but I wanna do, you know, something out there, which is just a, you know, a, a plaque on the wall or some sort of amazing thing.
Uh, but haven't yet sort of gone down the road of understanding how does this all work and what does it take to, to achieve totally. Well, all let's go what it takes to achieve the
[00:39:53] James Dice: let's, let's go through the different phases of a project with you guys. So through them [00:40:00] questions about each of them for you.
So let's go back the strategy phase. You talked about what is, what does the
[00:40:08] Bruce Duyshart: strategy stage there? Well, look, we start up with sort of, sort of education and communication around what sort of things you can actually do. So, you know, kinda run a. Get a shared vision happening. Mm-hmm um, understand what the, you know, what, what the end outcome is gonna look like.
Right. So, um, and at that point, you need to understand really what are the types of technologies that can actually be used. What's all, what does it mean? Um, and, uh, help them with the cost process, really. So to understand how much is this actually going to, to, to cost preemptively, most cost planners, you know, estimators are not good at this so we actually go through the whole process to, to help unpack that and understand what that is.
And we, we're pretty accurate in our, our estimates, you know, over time of what that actually looks like,
[00:40:52] James Dice: the cost estimates. Are you doing cost compared to status quo of, of the vision that they [00:41:00] have?
[00:41:00] Bruce Duyshart: Uh, how does that work again? Which, which again is a bit of a moving target, uh, as well. So what is status quo, right?
Are you comparing it to a building that is similar in nature that has done, for example, mobile access control or is a standard access. Right. Yeah. So there's always been a component which is gonna be a Delta to what is business usual or is it a brand new technology that they haven't considered before?
So for example, in this building, you've got people counters or IQ, sensors never been done before. Not a thing. Well, that's a part of a, you know, a technology uplift cost, right? So basically you're looking at Delta some way, at least some ability to articulate, um, a cost associated with it and kind you're scrutinizing back for the cost that include.
I'm not quite sure. usually the response you get back. So it's a little bit underwhelming, but, um, you know, at least they're increasingly getting aware of the topic [00:42:00] areas. Yeah. Mm-hmm um, and, and, um, but that's where kind our, you know, the experience that you need to understand, you know, how things actually get priced by, you know, contractors and so forth coming to play.
So at that particular point, you know, um, and we help articulate that, um, through a range of, of different, uh, ways and showing, you know, visually, you know, the master plan or, uh, with a kind of reverse brief, uh, as well, which basically encapsulate all that sort of thinking, uh, and being able to communicate the stakeholders.
This is what we plan to do essentially. So another way of articulating the strategy, part of it is sort of describing as a concept design stage. So that concept design stage, you really wanna have everybody on the same page and saying, No, you're not the outcome we're looking for here. Things that help to improve safety, security, sustainability, placemaking wellbeing, et cetera.
Yep. Mm-hmm and everybody is on the same in terms of investment, uh, and effort that will be required to do that's that's first around strategy. The next stage is design. [00:43:00] Uh, and typically we would take carriage of all the, uh, specialist technology areas on there as well. And, uh, we will look after things around the specifications for things such as the independent data layer.
This is another terminology that actually is confusing the whole industry. So we need to, to land on this independent, you know, I S P O I P. Me. I dunno, you know, it comes up with these different terminologies that people haven't quite stuck, but I think your, the description of an independent data layer is probably the best conceptual description of, of that as well.
But, you know, and there's multiple ways you can go around to it and increasing by the day, the, the Methodism and approaches that you can take to the architecture of that type of platform as well. But, uh, dashboards, uh, you know, so all the specialist technologies will take carriage of, and then also we need to provide some level of input to the services, engineers designs as well, who may or may not depending on their skillset, [00:44:00] understand what's required.
If the outcome is a smart building mm-hmm so that's detailed design, essentially getting it to a point when it goes out to market. That the market will understand and be able to easily interpret what is required from a technology perspective, um, in the same way that they're also understanding from a sustainability perspective, because there will be ESD consultant, for example, um, that is involved in defining what's required for them to achieve, you know, lead or green star or whatever.
It's OK. So you've got a technology component, you've got a sustainability component, you got your normal service component. And then hopefully the builder is in a position where they can actually understand what is required. What are the contractors they'll need? What are the proposed technologies that are on the, the text back, et C.
Uh, and ideally, you know how those different systems and approaches will be packaged mm-hmm across different contractors for it to work. So at that point, um, the project will have been, uh, [00:45:00] tendered. Um, and can I ask you a real quick follow up? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:45:04] James Dice: So you and I were having dinner at RealCom. We were stuffing our faces with tops and our mutual friend Tyson.
He said, he said, so Tysons, he said, Bruce writes the best specifications. Can you? And I wrote
[00:45:20] Bruce Duyshart: that down. Can you,
[00:45:23] James Dice: can you gimme some, like, how do you write the best specifications?
[00:45:26] Bruce Duyshart: And like, what are the best specifications? Well, the best specification is actually understanding how the thing gets built. Okay.
Yeah. At the end of the day, right? I mean, you, you have to put yourself in the contractor's shoes and go, well, what is it they need to know? And you look at a lot of specifications and there's just like, what is that? I mean, don't, you don't need to tell 'em about the standards and, and all that kinda stuff.
Right. So, um, that's perhaps not helpful. So I guess, you know, it's really, um, helping [00:46:00] contractors to price the job fairly and going back to this human engineering aspect of, of it. Right. So when people don't understand, there's a saying, you know, where it's mystery there's margin, right. Mm-hmm and, and, and people will price accordingly if a builder or contractor's looking at something, they don't understand.
It's like how that work. Mm-hmm I better raise my price to cover that because it doesn't end up the way that I think it's gonna come out rather, then I'm gonna get in trouble here. Right? Yeah. So it has, there has to be clarity around what's actually, you know, required. Um, and, um, yeah, being articulated a way that's just, yeah.
Easy, easy to interpret. Got it. Got it. Can you gimme an example
[00:46:39] James Dice: of something, like if you were writing a spec for the independent data layer, for instance, what would be something that would have to be in that to
[00:46:46] Bruce Duyshart: make that buildable? Of course, of course, of course. You've yeah, of course. You've, you've focused in on the trickiest.
One of all I had to simply because yeah, simply because there are emerging [00:47:00] a range of different architectures around this, and this is, I think, where it is actually getting quite tricky in the industry is, is I, what we, what we're doing here is a specification for the, what is it you need to do now, MSI, it's gonna come down to, well, how independent are they actually, in terms of the solutions they're gonna choose now, the definition of an.
Is someone who's able to integrate a whole range of different in their opinion, best practice technology systems together to help produce that. So in the network engineering world and integrate will go, well, we're gonna use this type of firewall, which might be different from all the Ciscos switches, for example, right?
And the reason why we use that particular firewall, because it's manageability, it's price point it's security levels, it's equivalent something. So rather than just buying one brand for everything you're going, look, we know that it's compatible because of these protocols and that we can actually integrate, you know, use that there.
It's easy to [00:48:00] integrate it. Save time, etcetera C. Now an integrator should be doing the same sort of thing now, but. That MSI turns out to be an agent for only one product. And the architecture of that particular product says that it has to go this particular way, then your ability to, you know, so, and we sort of, you know, we we're like Switzerland, right?
We have to be like Switzerland. Yeah. And so, okay, well look, we gotta play this, whether it's not gonna be leading down a path or it must be this particular, it must be, you know, this particular technology solution. And so, you know, the, the, the skill around this is coming up with, you know, supporting the principles of open standards, open systems, you knowability understanding, you know, OPEX costs and all those types of areas on there as well.
So it has to be written in a way that it's, it. Outcome focused. Yeah. Standards based in its approach and with enough flexibility there to allow the MSI to do what [00:49:00] they know best. Yeah. In terms of the way you actually procure and implement the particular system. And also ultimately is acting in the best interests of the asset owner, uh, at the end of the day, you know, trying to escape from the kind of technology technology's sake, you know, is there really a reason to capture this much data for the sake of capturing, you know, that much data.
Right. Does it really make economic sense to go through the pain of trying to capture the 90 points that are available to you in a smart meter? Right. When really we only need six. Yeah. Right. So putting a measure on it in a way that. Technology can be solved in many ways you can do there's more the way way's gonna account.
Right? So what's the most prudent economic way of going about doing is, is I think key. Yeah. To, to, to writing, uh, these specifications in a, in a way that that helps everybody win. Right? So you're doing the right thing by the owner. You're doing the right thing by the [00:50:00] builder. And you're not just punishing people for the sake of punishing people.
Cause you've got no idea. And for the points of data, I would just do everything. Right. So yeah, ultimately that doesn't doesn't go well.
[00:50:11] James Dice: okay. I, I interrupted you before the
[00:50:13] Bruce Duyshart: implementation phase. Uh, yeah, so I think, you know, at that point there, it's just really, uh, at the end of that procurement process, you know, talking with the builders, making sure that they understand what's involved talking with, um, they usually have a services engineer or someone like that that will be respons systems, you know, do they really properly understand what's involved in here?
Do they have the skill? Do they need a hand more often than not? They will need a hand in being able to, you know, steer through the process and understand what their contractors are doing because you know, you know, tenders are very time, pressure thing right back to this human condition's like, you know, has a builder seeing this sort of type of specification for the first time.
And they're kinda quiet on the inside freaking out. Yeah. Um, you know, are they admitting that [00:51:00] they're freaking out or they're just going, oh, we've got this we're good. And then out they're not good. They're you there's, which is very interesting transition from the point you through. You know, contractor X has got the job and then all, then, then, then the conversations come out going.
Yeah, we're gonna need a hand with this one.
but you know, we, we sure we're we assure people it's fine. Right? I mean, this is the journey that everyone's going on. Right. I think the mistake here is to say, I know it all mm-hmm right. I know, I know everything. Right. Um, because, um, it can be a recipe for disaster, so, and that's really what the implementation process is all about.
Right. It it's getting away from the, well, I assumed, right. Mm-hmm never assumed the assumptions that you think are in people's heads. Right? So the process here is to really go through and, and make sure that [00:52:00] that the builder is organized, structured, you know, is procuring at the right time. Um, you know, has got the right contractors on board, the contractors getting the right products, you know, they're presenting the right samples, the right level of testing's happening, you know, allowing for Murphy's law.
Um, um, and you know, the things can and will go wrong, you know, uh, and allowing think a lot of people suffer what I call optimism bias. Yeah. Yeah. How hard could it be? Well, actually hard. Right. But it's more to do with coordination, right. So, you know, one, one trade might get it, but the others simply do not, and they don't really understand the implications of what they're doing.
You know, take smart S for example, there's a knock on effect. It just looks a simple hydraulic thing, but actually now you've got network cabling involved. You've got, you know, mechanical or trying to report either back net or some other sort of, you know, communications. Protocol's gotta go to some other network, you know, suddenly the [00:53:00] plumbers going well, I mean, another, another world here, all of a sudden thought this back in climbing school, I never thought this would happen.
Right. So , so how does that work? Right. So you have to sort of help sort of steer that process, you know, through, and that's, that's, you know, what our guys actually are really good at is helping builders, you know, and then ultimately reporting back to the owners, um, that this is actually what's going on.
Yeah, yeah. This is actually how it's working and, and, and, uh, and so forth. So got it. Implementation is a pretty sort of interesting process, you know, leading all the way up to practical, um, completion where everybody wants everything sort of working on the day, um, at handover. So the first part of it, and then just.
Hand of that process to hand over to, uh, facility managers and make sure they understand how operate this building, which now has these 40 technologies in it compared to the six that they used to have rock off tongue rocks off, does human, human engineering. Right. [00:54:00] uh,
[00:54:01] James Dice: so I think one of the things people struggle with with all the, that process, you just took everyone through is the different roles of the people that aren't core contractors, right?
So there's like the consultant role that you guys are playing. There's the design engineers role. There's the MSI role. There's the commissioning agent role. All of those are kind of like in a way they're all kind of like service provider consultant type
[00:54:28] Bruce Duyshart: of. Professionals.
[00:54:30] James Dice: Right. So how do you delineate between all of those on the projects
[00:54:34] Bruce Duyshart: that, that you work on?
Well, well, that's a very important thing we, you know, to do, and that's what we establish our that's that's in the mind,
all these people, people , you know, what do they all do? Right. So the education process starts right there. So they need to be educated as to look here's what we do. [00:55:00] Here's what they do. In some cases, we are the lead on a certain topic, and then we will provide input to someone else's design. Right. Okay. In other cases, they are the they're the lead like the MEP consultant, right?
They're the lead, but we'll provide some input to the design that they're coming up with. And I think as long as those demarcation lines are actually clear upfront, uh, in the same way, as it's clear what an ESD consultant is actually doing, for example, um, you know, and how they're interacting, what access they were required.
And when that's all clear, upfront, and through the course of a project, then you don't have either double up or complete misses where no one's got it. And so if everyone's on the same page as to their roles and responsibilities over the course of a project, then the outcome is much. Got it. And then, so
[00:55:47] James Dice: specifically on the MSI piece, how do you guys, how do you sort of think about on a normal project when there's an MSI?
Like, what do you guys do and what do they do? Can you describe
[00:55:57] Bruce Duyshart: yeah. That, that process? Yeah. Well, it, it [00:56:00] it's a scale thing. And I think the biggest thing that we bring to the table, obviously, right. The specification for the first place and going to things, we were talking previously methodology about how they're doing things, but it's just applying the rigor and coordination.
And, uh, and time and cost effective in what, in what they're doing so that, so we helping to get the ducks all sort of all lined up in a way that actually sort of, they're getting timely information way. They're not going, where is this guy? That's meant to be the contractor. So, and so doing something, you know, then, then, um, those things are being coordinated in a way that, you know, that there's stuff being procured the matter, because look, their focus really is on the, this independent data layer, right?
Mm-hmm the presentation layer of how that all comes together. Right? So the more they can focus that and less on the. You know, where's, where's the system, where's the contractor. Who do I talk to? How's that all work, you know, [00:57:00] etcetera. Then they can really focus on the, the core deliverable, which is around the technology and so forth.
Yeah. Then, um, that makes everything sort of flow together. Cause we managing the, the client up one end, you know, the next incoming facilities manager, the, you know, uh, it might be a, a, you know, tenant, you know, rep manager or leasing agents. There's a whole lot of people that need to understand everything that's going on or about to happen on this particular project.
And everything's all been caught away. Then, then we can be, we can provide greater clarity around what the deliverables actually will look like. Mm-hmm, , we're gathering requirements a little bit along the way in that process. Well, helping to feed the MSI with timely information so they can do the best possible job.
Got it. Yeah. So basically just, I. Got
[00:57:49] James Dice: it. Cool. So let's tie this together. I'd love to hear about one project in particular that comes to mind like a case study. Can you tell us a story around, like [00:58:00] a specific building on this, this specifically, I'm curious about the 80, 20 thing, like who were the key humans that had to be brought along and yeah.
How
[00:58:10] Bruce Duyshart: did you sort of make it happen? Sure. I mean, I, I know that just before we started here, we said, okay, well, let's pull out one building. Right. But it's a bit like, sort of saying which, which one's your favorite? Which, which one's your favorite child, right? Yeah. Or it's, or, or it's a bit like saying, which is the smartest building in the world.
Right. You know? Yeah. It's like, well, you know, there's elements of different building. Yeah, where you know, which, which was good and bad. So, I mean, I talk across some of, sort of the issues that we see, which is probably more, more interest to
this process where, you know, education stake is really key. So, um, think really sort of, um, you know, getting things coordinated and, and aligned and, and so forth in the, in the documentation processes [00:59:00] is, is really sort of you critical. Um, but in, in construction, um, things happen that require a of attention to a success product.
So even products with all these different things going on and things are being signed off cetera, you walk in the comms room and it's like, hang on, we've got a whole bin model that's building and I'm seeing trade waste pipes going through the comms room. How does this happen? Right. So building, but winning
site
must done that. Alright. Okay. Yeah. We'll just get them to move it. Right. But just so much stuff sort of happens. That's unexpected. Mm-hmm so, yeah. Um, there's that delivery process there across the board that can occur and it's the diligence appli to the way it gets delivered. So [01:00:00] at the end of the day, um, these things do actually come, come together, but requires an enormous amount of, of, of work and facilitation.
And we've, we've got a number of building that multiple, um, awards, like G exchange in Adelaide. We did. And, um, you know, even sort of going through the process of writing the award submission. You do begin to realize the enor of the effort that was required all the way from the very beginning to, you know, have a client that is able to set a vision properly that sort of says, well, you know, help them to create that vision.
You know, probably more the case. They understand, look, they have an aspiration, we wanna do this articulate, you know, what are the benefits actually, being able to articulate those benefits back, you know, really, really clearly is important to making sure that you've got a team that actually works. So, you know, I think the successful projects are the ones where there is a there's the, there is a great.
You know, in there throughout the [01:01:00] delivery process and understanding and working with the, because you're there to help. I think a perception from a lot of builders is there pain in
are doing all this technology stuff you're just describing to me. And I'm having to get water meters of a type that we've never used before. I'm having to get my contract to do things in terms of pulling data. We never had to worry about before. So we were just talking about this the other day in, in, in our work in progress meeting there about the process when creating a smart building is now putting onto. The construction and delivery process of a building that has never been there before.
Totally mm-hmm you, you were talking about the role of an independent commissioning agent. Now the independent commissioning agent, their sole purpose of being there is to make sure that a BMS actually has been a [01:02:00] mechanical, mechanical plant has been delivered to a standard. That's gonna meet specifications, gonna meet the standards that are required, et cetera, cetera.
Now this is now being required for technology. So for the first time, a lot of.
Are being scrutinized as to the quality of the work of the systems that they're actually delivering. Right. So for the first time there's someone looking over their shoulder and saying, is your people counting system actually counting all, all the number of people they're building accurately. Yeah. Has it been commissioned properly?
Are we getting data out of these, you know, electric vehicle charges properly in the right way? Can we actually understand, you know, the faults in there or one of the data points associated with the car parking system, you know, is it working? So there's a lens now. That we're applying across multiple systems for an entire building, which we are calling a smart building in a process that's never been done before.
I think this is, this is somewhat confronting, as you could imagine for a lot of people, right. That a, I think a lot of people [01:03:00] don't inherently understand the way buildings actually work in the first place. They just understand. Oh yeah. To working. Yep. Access control to working seems to working is
keying accurately something, oh, it's not something else. So, you know, in a way that I think the good thing about the technology and the data layer and so forth there is your independently validating that each of these different systems that the owner is actually investing. Is actually working and working optimally, which then comes back to the definition of a smart building.
Although building is able to continuously improve its performance over time. So unless you've actually created an environment where you can actually improve that point and understand that here's your line, the sand, and from this point forward, we can actually improve upon that. Yeah. Um, it, it it's a real [01:04:00] challenge, right?
So the success. Project coming back to the original sort of question is the project where that team is actually working together with a shared vision that says, look, this is the outcome we, we, we actually need, it's not just a tick in the box that says, yeah, system X has been implemented. Good. Excellent.
I'll see you later. Let me know, happens within the defect liability period. It's like, no, no, no. This all has to work together in a way. So therefore it has to be understood by the contractors when the moment they're engaged. Yeah. But this is the outcome we are looking for, you know, and that's where the successful products actually happened because everyone was able to.
Understand that that is that there's the outcome that's actually gonna be required here. And, um, you know, when you go through that process and actually able to ascertain that all these things did actually occur, um, that, you know, and you can articulate that in a way that that demonstrates to other people, but that's the case.
Then you have a successful project on your hands, but it doesn't end there. Obviously it, you know, it all then comes down the line. Um, and the handover to the operations team is [01:05:00] really, really important. And you, you need those gems of people, which is the generation of professionals that I think we genuinely need in the industry board, all this use of technology, right?
Mm-hmm um, that, that that's, you know, we, the industry's crying out for you. You know, if you, if you wanna do your digital. Well, you better find the right guy that understands how to, uh, the implications of running a building. That actually is a digital twin because it's, uh, it's it's complex, right?
Absolutely. Um, absolutely.
[01:05:32] James Dice: Bob, Bruce, this has been awesome. Let's let's close with some carve outs. So my carve out's easy. It's your book? Smarter buildings, better experiences. I'll put that link to the book and the show notes. People definitely check it out. Uh what's
[01:05:45] Bruce Duyshart: what's yours though. I mean, I listen to a whole bunch of different sort of podcasts on different. I listen to a podcast called fully charged, which is around electric vehicles, electr of transport and so forth, which leads to all sorts of things around battery sort of technology side. I thought that's [01:06:00] on the nerds side of thing.
Business wars is awesome. So there's a great lot of narratives around there, you know, Coke versus Pepsi and, you know, Uber versus Lyft and things like that, which is pretty, you know, awesome. Uh, there's a, there's another sort of. Awesome sort of tech one called, um, interesting called another podcast. uh, who just, uh, these sort of Silicon valley, um, analysts are talking about, you know, all the latest sort of tech and so going on there, top myself up with that every now and again, um, there's one called 99% invisible mm-hmm
Um, which is, which is pretty awesome. Um, just lot of to do with, you know, either design and built environment and, you know, it's a nice sort of steady pace talking about things that are going on the world, on the music front. I, you know, I like listening to, a lot of, sort of, uh, you know, electronic sort of, you know, house, uh, progressive, no.
OK. All stuff like that as well. So to like elk, so [01:07:00] he, somewhere around the, so all.
Horror of other people who, well, for me, horror of other people who just have, you know, not as progressive music taste. Yeah. Yeah. uh, that's great. I'll have to put those in the show too. Yeah. Pretty, pretty, pretty mixed. I'll send you those links on there as well, but you know, sometimes it's, it's, it's good to be out there on, on different fronts as well.
You not just the straight tech and business as well, but on music as well. So yeah, I enjoy that. Love it. Love it.
[01:07:37] James Dice: Making the, making the podcast more, more groovy
[01:07:40] Bruce Duyshart: there you, so Bruce,
[01:07:44] James Dice: well coming on the show, it's been
[01:07:46] Bruce Duyshart: a pleasure. No, no worries. Thanks James.
[01:07:52] James Dice: All right friends, thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus Podcast. For more episodes like this and to get the weekly Nexus Newsletter, which [01:08:00] by the way, readers have said is the best way to stay up to date on the future of the smart building industry, please subscribe at nexuslabs.online. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. Have a great day.
“My 80/20 rule is that it's 20% of technology—and there are a lot of technologies in a smart building. And it's 80% about people and human engineering."
—Bruce Duyshart
Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technology—hosted by James Dice. If you’re new to Nexus, you might want to start here.
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Episode 115 is a conversation with Bruce Duyshart, founder and Director of Meld Strategies, a Smart Building Consultancy based in Sydney Australia.
In this discussion, we'll unpack the role of a Smart Building Consultant and the process of running and managing a Smart Building project and the human side of what it takes to create a successful project.
Without further ado, please enjoy the Nexus podcast with Bruce Duyshart.
You can find Bruce on LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
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Music credit: Dream Big by Audiobinger—licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
[00:00:03] James Dice: hello friends, welcome to the nexus podcast. I'm your host James dice each week. I fire questions that the leaders of the smart buildings industry to try to figure out where we're headed and how we can get there faster without all the marketing fluff. I'm pushing my learning to the limit. And I'm so glad to have you here following along.
[00:00:31] James Dice: This episode is a conversation with Bruce dice, sharp founder and director of meld strategies, a smart building consultancy based in Sydney, Australia. And this discussion, we unpack the role of a smart building consultant and the process of running and managing a smart building project and the human side of what it takes to create a successful project.
So without further ado, please enjoy the nexus podcast with Bruce Disert. Hey, Bruce. Welcome to the show. Can you introduce yourself?
[00:00:57] Bruce Duyshart: Hi James. Um, my name is, uh, Bruce [00:01:00] ARD and I'm the, uh, founder and principal of strategies. We're consultancy based in Sydney, in Australia. All
[00:01:08] James Dice: right. Start with background
[00:01:11] Bruce Duyshart: way back for me, way back. Yeah, way back. Well, I guess my way back point of difference, uh, is that I'm actually an architect by training.
So I started out, uh, being trained as a, as an architect, um, all the way, uh, uh, back in the, uh, in the eighties. And, uh, so a computer, a bachelor of planning and design did a batch of architecture in. Um, and, um, yeah, it was, it was a long haul. It was, um, I just very sort of intense degree and you spend a lot of time in the one building, whatever.
So a lot of camaraderie goes out that, and you, you basically outta that, you, you learn about problem solving. It's probably the biggest sort of takeout from all of that. And, uh, when, uh, I graduated, there was this [00:02:00] massive, massive recession in the industry. So pretty much every single one of us did not have a job.
But, uh, being me, I was one of the nerds during university that actually got into computer design the very early days. So I think one of the very earliest IBM PCs, some of the various earliest versions of AutoCAD that you could possibly imagine. And, uh, after having been chastised for having used, you know, the audacity to have used a computer doing my architectural degree and not doing anything with, you know, uh, lines and over apple lines and so forth, uh, found ourself in a position where we were setting up a summer school to teach architects who were out of work, how to use this new technology thing in computer design.
And, uh, one thing led to another and the professor of the university love what we were doing is that, you know, keep going and it was meant to be just a. A two week thing and people just kept on enrolling and we had to start from scratch. We even setting this thing up, we had to build a network. We had to write courseware.
We had to do all these training materials. We had to teach and lecture, which we'd never done before. Um, [00:03:00] and one thing led to another and two weeks turned into two months, which eventually turned into a job offer and suddenly we were employed. And, um, yeah, we had a, a stable job with income at the worst possible time and learning about new technology and, and the birth of the internet, literally and learning all these different things, uh, about every type of, you know, things like, uh, you know, FTP and gofer and really early internet sort of weird stuff before even the worldwide web came about.
So it was a great introduction, forced fed, um, regarding technology and so forth. So, uh, I was lecturing at Melbourne university in design, so I established the first teaching course there in cap design for people. Uh, I completed my master's, um, in digital documents. There. So I got deep into understanding what's the purpose of the document?
Um, what are the digital equivalent of it? How's it all work? So then sort of figured all the nuts and bolts of, of, of all that. Um, and then, uh, I worked in various different sort of architectural practices as well doing, you know, [00:04:00] uh, that sort of stuff for fathers and architect as well. Um, and then I got picked up by, uh, by Lendlease to kind of work on a, on a project there.
So doing this technology things and helping them do remote working and, uh, using video conferencing to communicate to remote sites and things like that. Um, and, uh, and of course the project then went into a, into, into a, also the projects on, on hold. And another kinda mini recession was beginning to happen.
It was like, great. This keeps on happening to me. and they then said, look, uh, come, come up to Sydney though. I was based outta Melbourne at the time. So come up to Sydney. And, uh, because we believe the skills that you have are just too important to the organization to, just to let go. So come up there. So had to re sorts of different things.
So you, I, up for years, so through various different roles, doing project management technology, the design group there, I headed in a business group, uh, it project director, various different projects, [00:05:00] you know, did all the technology for our, uh, new head office, which was the first five star green star, uh, building in Australia.
So got into all the, you know, the. The, the physical operational technology and it components of that fit out technologies and so forth. Um, that then gave me the unable task of, of, um, establishing and setting up the project management office, which then turned into a global role. So next minute, having to manage guys and work with other guys in different regions, uh, in Australia, UK, us to, um, establish, you know, doing project management properly across all these it projects and sort of, I'll sort of completely up to, to here world all of that.
Um, and that went up for 16 years. And so I did, you know, major projects like the technology master plan for Barangaroo, which is a 6 billion sort of, um, waterfront product in, in Sydney that was, uh, you know, very sort of large and sort of complex. And it was something like, uh, I think the time I left it was about 26 different versions of, of a master plan that was going on there for [00:06:00] the, for the whole precinct.
That was pretty hectic, but I'd worked across the whole of Australia, every single asset class. You could possibly imagine, you know, residential retail, you know, commercial property, master plan precincts, you know, getting, uh, fiber to the premise, uh, sort of technology Jeep on some technology for master plan communities, you know, three years ahead of a national rollout of the same technology.
So pretty much historically over my career, I've been at the, at the bleeding edge of, of technology and new emerging technologies have actually come. And then nine years ago, established Mel strategies. And so, um, you know, had a vision then to establish, um, a consulting business around creating smart buildings.
At a point, everyone was going what the hell's a smart building, which was a very, very interesting prospect, cuz it hadn't quite settled at that particular point. People going, oh, is it intelligent building? Is it a mm-hmm I dunno what it is, you know? And then what's the definition of a smart building. And then you, you just you'd read these [00:07:00] definitions that go on for, for pages.
It's like you're falling asleep halfway through the definition and going, I, you get the clear things. So I wrote a book, right? So I kind of basically unpacked my brain from everything I had learned over my career to that point. Ah, there you
[00:07:21] James Dice: audio, I just out Bruce's book, smarter buildings, better experiences, beautiful yellow cover.
[00:07:27] Bruce Duyshart: Yeah, there you go. So that was me unpacking my brain as to how does one go about creating smart building when not actually at that point, having yet created a smart building from start to finish in it, completeness, you know, done elements of, and done ICS and IP backbones, all the different bits, but sort of collectively having a process by which you can actually create a smart building, requires a considerable amount of thought.
And so for me, the process of writing a book was an ability to actually concentrate [00:08:00] on a topic for the first time and say, how, how, how should one actually go about doing this? And so as I began to piece it all together and go, right, this has to be on there. So knowing. Know, all of the human engineering, uh, discovery, you know, planning, uh, brainstorming, blue sky planning, all those sort of things, you know, cost planning, et cetera, all the stuff that I have learnt over my career, how to do this.
I had to put together a formulate into, into a plan, which basically says here is the as, as he, uh, like to call in the us or in some parts, uh, the whole thing from soup to nuts, from start to finish as to how it all comes together. So that's kind of the background of, of, of, uh, so now have established Mel strategies and we specialize just in credit smart building.
So we're not an engineering firm, we're not an MSI. We basically help our clients who are property developers. And we work with design professionals. We work with builders and, and so forth to help them [00:09:00] realize a vision, uh, and a strategy for creating a smart building, helping to find what actually it is.
And, and, and just going through that whole process and steering everything out there. So there's a guiding hand throughout the whole process. Got
[00:09:13] James Dice: it, got it. Yeah, the story, the background, the reason I have this is because I, when I was creating our foundations course, I was kind of like you where I was like, I'm still learning this in a way, but I'm also, I haven't put all these pieces together.
And so it was like, I put together my outline and then I read your book and I was like, okay, we're, we're, we're along the same lines in most, in most parts of your book, it maps pretty well to, that's how we teach smart buildings in our foundations course. Um,
[00:09:43] Bruce Duyshart: yeah.
[00:09:44] James Dice: So that's that, that was fun. So thank you for that.
Yeah. Helping, helping create
[00:09:47] Bruce Duyshart: that. Oh, pleasure. I mean, I mean the, I, I mean, probably like yourself, I mean, I was in writing a book and going well at that point, I think there's about. Two other books, I think [00:10:00] around at the time that actually think, think Jim monopoly had one. And so use that one too. They're quite, yeah.
Quite technical, right? Yeah. So you look at this thing going well written for engineers, right? So I was going, okay, well, how do we make this accessible? Just like your podcast is right. So you are saying, okay, how do we translate this in a way that actually enables a greater majority of people to actually understand what the hell concepts are.
So weird stuff like, you know, I'd been in meetings where people are going, we're talking about IP the other minute, someone ears up and get the involved. Here's like, yeah, that's TCP. It's something else. It was like, you know, people just didn't understand the fundamentals, you know, things like bandwidth or just basic, basic, basic.
And then even when I started researching it, man, what what's illustration that, that shows you what, what is bandwidth, right? Yeah. And it's. Perplexing as to why some [00:11:00] basic concepts aren't even illustrator explained to people. Yeah. In layman's terms, in a way that helps 'em to understand. So I congratulate you on your podcast and helping to sort of UN unpack these sorts of topics to help explain to people.
Thanks. What's going on here. Thanks. And I had
[00:11:14] James Dice: a, um, actually a similar college experience too. So I graduated in 2010, so I don't know what financial crisis you were a part of, but mine was the global, global financial
[00:11:25] Bruce Duyshart: crisis. Oh, crisis. Yeah, that was when I
[00:11:27] James Dice: graduated and, and I was still able to find a job.
But at that point, for me, it was similar to you. Like you became an expert in CAD, which was a little early. I became an expert in energy modeling and that really helped me. Right. Um, I, I learned it in college as an intern. And then, you know, took that into the workforce. When a bunch of mechanical engineers knew a ton about HVAC.
They didn't know. Anything about how to produce an energy
[00:11:49] Bruce Duyshart: model. So, anyway, yeah.
[00:11:51] James Dice: It's funny how you, you use technology to kind of find jobs in hard
[00:11:55] Bruce Duyshart: times. That's, that's it, you know, outta lemons. [00:12:00] Exactly. There's a
[00:12:01] James Dice: part of your background though, that doesn't make sense to me. So you were an architect by training, you learn CAD, but then all of a sudden you'd had this it job.
So how'd you learn the it side of.
[00:12:11] Bruce Duyshart: Um, well out of necessity again. So, um, through setting up, for example, the networking side of the, of the network for the computer training course, somehow we got involved in helping set up the network for the whole in the faculty building. So, you know, that point there was that side of things.
I got involved in doing the programming stuff. So I train myself on how to, uh, program in, in order list and, and things like that. Designing web pages. So coding on that side. So there was a coding aspect to it. There was a networking aspect to it. And then bit by bit, you begin to build up and what's going on around you.
And remember, cause it's early days, you know, everything sort of new and everyone's going all right. Hey, did you know that you can just click on something here and next minute you are over an MIT and you can browse through this directory thing over there and look in all these [00:13:00] folders and see stuff was going on.
It's like, you know, mind blown. And of course you then dig and dig and dig and saying, how's that work? And you know, how's how. You know, how's it happen? So I think, you know, have an inquisitive mind to understand how things actually work, as opposed to theory of it is, is, is essential to an innovator and understanding where, where can go next and then reading where things are going and just educating.
[00:13:24] James Dice: Yeah, absolutely all. So tell me more about, um, meld. So can you talk about some of the key projects you guys work on right now? Like what types of projects, what types of buildings, what types of clients do you.
[00:13:38] Bruce Duyshart: Yes. So, uh, look, I mean, starting off with the team, you gotta have a good team to, to, to, to begin with, right?
So again, you know, you need people that actually have experience and we, we have a, a range of people with large different sort of, you know, background and so forth, some through sort of the architectural sort of, you know, path there as well. Um, project management, um, you know, in a range of different areas [00:14:00] as well.
Um, people who worked on building control systems and, um, you know, electrical engineers, solar engineers, you know, all that sort of stuff there builds up a team whereby we actually understand how these things work. Right. So, um, and, uh, it's really important to have a, a team with capability that has the experience enough to know how to go about, you know, you know, doing this.
Yep. Mm-hmm so the projects we get involved in are, uh, commercial office, uh, building sort of, you know, starting from, from scratch, new builds, um, And, um, that starts our process from the very beginning sort of end to end. Um, there's, uh, different types of refurbishment projects that come up from time to time where asset owners looking to say, well, what else can we do?
Because obviously it becomes a bit of a comparison game, um, and times, and people are going okay, well, we've seen these new buildings have these features around what they're doing in their lobby regarding visitor management, for example, or, um, just simply getting an IP backbone in the building, [00:15:00] um, you know, um, or having dashboards in the building, um, or improving the vendor facilities.
So you need, um, you know, smart lockers in there, things like that. So refurbishment projects bring around a lot of the attributes, more so on the, um, occupant facing technologies. Yeah. Um, and, uh, workplace things. So COVID has been a, I guess, a massive, um, Uh, catalyst for introducing a new range of technologies.
And I found that throughout my career, um, as, as well, when times get tough actually weirdly or fortuitously people actually turn to technology as a potential solution. So you need to differentiate yourself on the market. You need to actually use technology to increase efficiency and performance of, of, of buildings and, and things at workplaces and, and so forth.
And so, um, yeah, so people do focus on te and we definitely saw that throughout, uh, where people are going, right? What are we gonna do here to help facilitate [00:16:00] return to work? So we've got, uh, lots of projects where we have been working with clients. Uh, nationally across their portfolio, uh, helping them understand how do we improve workplace environments and the use of technologies in that workplace, but then surprise, surprise.
How does that workplace environment integrate with the base building, um, and, and work around areas such as security and so forth. So that to improve that user experience of coming into the building or working there after hours or number of people coming in etcetera. So pretty diverse and across commercial office buildings, uh, mixed use, uh, uh, retail, um, residential, multi multiunit, residential build to rent, things like
[00:16:43] James Dice: that.
Yeah. Yeah. And so it seems like looking at some of your work and the projects you've worked on, which we're gonna talk about a little bit later in more detail. Sure. But I just wanted to ask you this upfront. Yeah. Um, It seems like you have a similar mindset to a lot of the writing I've been doing [00:17:00] recently around the horizontal architecture.
It seems like, like you just said integrating with the base building. Right. So there's the base building, which is the device layer and it seems like everything you do or everything you've done recently has some sort of converged network
[00:17:14] Bruce Duyshart: happening. Yes. And then sort of,
[00:17:17] James Dice: yeah. And then some sort of data platform on top.
I can't remember what you call it and then some sort of application layer at the top. Is that kind of your, your
[00:17:26] Bruce Duyshart: mindset that's that's, that's pretty much the architecture. Yeah. Yes, because basically the, the simple principle is that the, the control systems at the bottom end of that layer, the operational technology is, are really your best of breed systems.
Right? So they're your access control, lighting control, lift control, you know, et cetera. Yeah. Obviously all these systems over time need to connect to an IP network. Right. So that's your well. In, in the states, you call it a converge network. Um, uh, or we call it, um, an integrated communications network or an ICN, um, [00:18:00] principles, the, the same, however, the subtle, the, um, and it sort of reinforced, uh, with me when I went to the, um, Igon conference, you know, recently is that converge network terminology, uh, has come about because there's more owner-occupied assets in the states, thereby you've got it.
And operational technologies coexisting on the one network. So you might have a, an entire building, for example, that's owned by Adobe or, um, you know, so they, they own the building and they're the tenant in there. So. The economy of scale is put in on the one network, which on paper looks good, right? In Australia, we freak out that concept because really these two things should be air gap from each other, because otherwise you you're basically putting yourself in front of a whole range of cybersecurity, you know, issues on, on that front, on there.
So you've got sensitive potentially, you know, um, commercial and confident, you know, information or identifiable [00:19:00] information, blah, blah, blah. Right. All all, okay. Going, going up the same network. Right. And that's only gonna be as good as the weakest link in the chain. Right. So that can go complex very, very quickly.
So we we'd like to prefer to keep those things separately. Uh, and then that independent data layer on top, which you're talking about, which is sort of changing in shape and size and, and so forth there. And then a presentation layer on top of all of that, mm-hmm, that architecture brings about a flexibility.
To choose the best of breed right. Of what's going around. And, and, um, you know, what I've learned over my career, as much as you'd like to think the last building is just like the next building, E E every building more or less is a prototype mm-hmm because you're not stamping out exactly the same building every single time.
Even if it's stage one, stage two is stage three of a, you know, three building, uh, precinct, for example, it is likely that over the course of those projects, things will inevitably change. So things will change and in changes of [00:20:00] technology or. Have happened because of procurement processes or the design team has changed slightly or the construction team slightly different or other, other types of things.
So as much as you would hope that this is just a infinitely, repeatable exactly the same process. Mm-hmm every building ends up more or less having some unique characteristics, which requires the handhold, which is kind of the service we provide to our customers to help them steer their way through totally understanding how to, how to achieve the best possible outcome.
Under the circumstances with the budget. They've got looking at the risk profile I have for the project. Got it. Before we get
[00:20:39] James Dice: to the handhold, I'd love to hear just how so you've been doing this for nine years. Yeah. How is that data layer that independent data layer? How has that piece of the puzzle changed throughout those nine years?
[00:20:52] Bruce Duyshart: let's just say it's a work in progress. I mean, this it's it's. [00:21:00] It's both overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time, the progress that has been made. Right? I mean, you, you've sort of had this under the microscope many times on your, on your podcast. And, um, everyone just hones in on the BMS, I think mainly cuz everyone that's the background that they had.
And, and here we are in 2022, whatever's going, there is no complete set of data tags or the what's the right ontology, blah, blah, blah, to, you know, help explain. What's just in that environment, let alone go down the, all the others mm-hmm to all the other stuff there as well. And, and soon as you head past your traditional kind of, you know, lift sliding control access, etcetera, you know, the.
The mine goes blank and the whiteboard goes up and they're going, I dunno, what are we gonna call these data points? That's coming outta our car, our car park management system, for example, right.
You know, what discipline does that [00:22:00] even fall under? Um, and you know, there's a lot of, you know, areas there that have yet to be fully, um, resolved, but look, the principles are all the same. Yeah. And, and at the end of the day, there has to be just clear communication around how does what your approach actually is.
And there has to be well documented and understood and communicated and so forth. And, um, I guess out of frustration, a lot of organizations have gone. Okay, well, look, we're gonna have to start just developing our own standards around. Trying to comply as much as possible possible with emerging and evolving standards, but at least getting that line, the standards documented that says, okay, next job.
Here's where we, we last left off and it should be sort of blamed like this mm-hmm consistency and documentation is, is key so that the next person picking it up or the other person on that project and understand what the hell's actually going
Che
really[00:23:00]
[00:23:05] James Dice: role
[00:23:09] Bruce Duyshart: to
[00:23:09] James Dice: start with that topic would be your definition. So you mentioned earlier, there's, you know, these definitions end up looking like books and fall asleep before you get to the end of 'em. How, how do you guys define what a, what a smart
[00:23:23] Bruce Duyshart: building is smart building is. Okay. Right. So this is one of the things I had to do in my, in my book as well.
And even then I've done a sort of tweaks, you know, to it. So we've defined a smart building as a building that's safer, healthier, more comfortable, resilient, and productive, uh, building for its occupants. And we operationally efficient one for its owners through its lifecycle. And the key thing there we emphasize is the life cycle aspect of it.
Right? It's it's thinking beyond the defect liability, as you know, sort of say you, a lot of buildings are designed to the defect liability and see a right. So builders [00:24:00] aren't, uh, encumbered with the operational expense of running a building, for example. So as much as they will fulfill the requirements to make it.
You know, lead gold, lead platinum, green star, whatever sort of rating type of building, understanding how to continuously improve the performance of the building in order to lower energy consumption or lower operational costs really is not a part of their KPIs of the thinking in delivering the building.
Right. So it's really important to, um, understand that the drivers that sit, um, behind that and how one can actually achieve, you know, those outcomes.
[00:24:38] James Dice: Yeah. OK. Hey guys, just another quick note from our sponsor Nexus labs. And then we'll get back to the show. This episode is brought to you by nexus foundations, our introductory course on the smart buildings industry. If you're new to the industry, this course is for you. If you're an industry vet, but want to understand how technology is changing things.
This course is also for you. The alumni are raving [00:25:00] about the content, which they say pulls it all together, and they also love getting to meet the other students on the weekly zoom calls and in the private chat room, you can find out more about the course@courses.nexus lab. Start online. All right, back to the interview
OK. So now talk about the, the role, like the role you play to like, make that happen.
[00:25:20] Bruce Duyshart: Right? So it starts off with the, with the strategy side of things and really helping, uh, You know, the client understand what is it, what is the outcome that they're actually, you know, looking for?
And most of the time, they don't really understand necessarily what that, that, that is right. Mm-hmm um, so they've heard about it. Um, look, the analogy I give is, is always, it's a bit like when green buildings first came about, right? So when green buildings first came out of our own life, great concept makes sense.
When it could be more environmentally sustainable let's let's start making green buildings pause. What does that actually [00:26:00] mean? what does that mean? You know, and then sort of the girls and going, OK. What is a green building? Good point. Okay. And then as you begin to unpack that people have realized, okay, it's a holistic design process.
It is, it affects everything. It affects the materiality of the building. It affects, um, you know, the, the, the way you measure the building, you know, all the sustainable sort of principles have to, and, and they apply to mechanical electrical, hydraulic lift, know cetera, cetera, right? Mm-hmm, all the way down ultimately to sort of, you know, workplace environments, cetera, depending on what you are doing.
And they're always is that separation between core and shell and tendency as well. Now, one forward, um, that's the same with technology and smart building. So the strategy part of it really is being sort of understanding, you know, what is the outcomes you are looking for depending upon. Stakeholders that you're trying to appeal to.
I mean, is, is this something that's really being driven yeah. By the facilities managers or is it something that's been driven [00:27:00] by, uh, you know, leasing and tenants, you know, is it something that's been driven by sustainability? Is it being, and, and the reality is it's more than likely going to be a combination of all those different stakeholders.
Yeah. So that right. So really is to be on what the outcomes what's in for me
a do bank. Yeah. So understanding what those, those, um, questions actually are and what are the outcomes you're trying to achieve. And how's that gonna actually work is, is critical sort of steering through that, that strategy process to help articulate a clear vision around the outcomes to, to, to be achieved.
Yeah,
[00:27:49] James Dice: it sounds like a lot of it is, is human engagement. Can you, can you talk about this 80
20
[00:27:54] Bruce Duyshart: rule that you have? Oh yeah. So my 80 80 20 rule is, is, [00:28:00] um, pretty much that it's 20% about technology and there are a lot of technologies in building. So we would see probably anywhere from 25 to 40 different sort of technologies or technology touchpoints in a building involved in a smart building.
Um, and it's about people and human engineering, right? So what I've learned over over many years is that all the way from the beginning through to the end, funny enough, there's people involved and they all have different. They all go about thinking about and using technology, different ways. Some people.
Want to be there and are proactive and assertive and don't really care how it actually happens, but they've got a vision to say, I want this to happen. Right. So they're kinda your early adopter, their crowd, early majority. Then there's got people who are sitting on the right they're majority and they just going, I guess.
So, um, and then you got the guys there just do not wanna be there, right? Yeah. And it's like until there's some sort of evidence and they're, they're the guys that are gonna be prodding [00:29:00] and they're gonna be saying, well, prove to me the ROI, you know, why, why should we be putting these things in here?
Showing me the evidence that says that this has been successfully done before across five different buildings, right. Uh, etcetera, you know, and if we'd adopted that same mindset, we'd probably still be going around in a Paulson card still, um, you know, et cetera. So really. Being able to read the room, understand those different value propositions, understanding what represents value to the person who's actually going well, why should we do this?
Right. Knowing, so every now and again, still to this day, you'll have someone saying, so why are we using an IP network? Do that seriously? You know, this is 20 and you still have sometimes people going well, why? Right. It doesn't. Cause they never sat down enough to sort of think about why and, and mm-hmm then going, oh my God.
OK. Right. Let cast my mind back 20 years ago when I was being asked the same thing and what was the, what was the [00:30:00] rationale that one could use to do that? And that's, that was something that I had to do on the Barangaroo project, for example. Yeah. We're I saying we have an ICN in every building, right. So here's a 6 billion precinct trying and go, why, why are we doing an ICN since the builder?
Like, right. Okay. So how much should we spend? How much do we spend on cabling? For example. And I'm asking this question to, you know, 30 year veteran cost planning, estimators, right here we going, of course we, uh, and then pregnant pause. The reality is they didn't know the answer. They didn't know how much money was actually spent on cabling.
Why? Because they know that there's an electrical package. Yeah. And with an electrical package, there's a security package. Yeah. They know that there's cabling associated with it, but they don't understand the real cost associated with it. Right. Because they haven't unpacked it enough because they just look at a cost per square meter rate and they say, that's it.
Right. And as [00:31:00] you and I both know, you can't estimate the cost of a. On a cost per square meter rate because technology's elemental. Right. And, uh, so taking people through that process to say, okay, well you can actually save money using us. Yeah. And I had to go back to first principles and say, okay, how much a cost for linearal meter for cabling and trays and coordination and blah, blah, blah.
And then we, we, you know, eventually came up with a number that was just unbelievably massive, right? And the millions and millions of dollars of savings that could be made just through simply dematerialization of cabling to arrive at one common IP infrastructure, et cetera. But that was the evidence. A certain element of, of, you know, of, of the industry required in order of them to make the next step logically that says, okay, accept.
Now, the fact that that having a common converged IP network actually is more efficient and will save us money on this particular project. But unless you're prepared to some [00:32:00] cases go through that behavioral change process and provide the evidence, you sometimes are gonna get a lot of, no on things, but it's kinda, the experience is knowing.
What direction people are actually sort of pushing in or likely to behave and knowing when is the timely information they'll need in order to help them make decisions around different things, right. They're hearing feedback for, from leasing agents that, yes, that would be useful thing to have in the building.
We here is feedback about the importance of sorts of things, and then trip facilities, you know, and so forth. And the other aspect of it really is, um, understanding how buildings actually operate and work, uh, and, and so forth. And having that, you know, that human experience about operationally, how that works could then lead into the business process.
And then the technology importantly, that drives all of that and actually can support that outcome on there. So we don't like doing. Technology for technology's sake. So it has to be driven by a, uh, you know, a business [00:33:00] need for doing it. And, um, that 80, 20 rule, you know, you need to be prepared to do the hards and that's where the experience comes in because you've been there before.
You've seen it before you've seen the pushback, you know, what goes wrong in the field? Um, you know, it actually works enough to help guide and facilitate people based upon the experience to, to make things happen. Yeah, totally. And the bigger pitch of all of that is that if, if, if that process is not facilitated, things tend to fall down mm-hmm and the process of, of concept design or detail design or construction operates, the handover can fall over.
And if one part of that falls over on the way, then guess what technology falls under the bus and, and then, you know, the headline reads. Oh, this whole thing is stupid. You know, technology hasn't worked, which bit are all of it. Oh,
actually what the they're talking about, which part of it. [00:34:00] Right. So, you know, weakest link in the chain, particularly when this is all new and experiences there and everyone learning curve is, is, is hard. Right? So you need to learn to expect the issues to come about and how to deal with that. Yeah. Type of thing, behaviorally.
Yep. Totally. This
[00:34:18] James Dice: is all very validating to me because
our, our course that we, you know,
developed with, with the help of your book, but with a lot of other input as well, but it's very validating because if there's been one criticism of it from students, it's that you didn't quite get into AI or you didn't quite get into digital twins enough at like, I, I wanted to go deeper into technology, but.
What I've, what we've created it around is like every week is kind of like 80, 20 every, every week. Like it's basically engaging stakeholders, um, developing out use cases, which means engaging with people, uh, that are actually out there doing things and [00:35:00] buildings, um, engaging with integrators and understanding what needs to happen in existing systems to enable new new technologies, um, engaging with the supply chain and the vendors out there to understand what technologies are capable of.
Right. Um, yes. Yes. Engaging with financial stakeholders to understand how this use case makes an impact in someone's business. Right. Uh, and then finally we do week six, which is, um, all about careers and all about like all the companies that are in our industry. Like if you're gonna get a job in smart building, Like, what are the types of companies?
What, the types of roles. So if you think about that, what I just
said, like that's all people
[00:35:43] Bruce Duyshart: 100s not to be underestimated and, and just sort of picking up your point there that you made about digital twins and AI, right? I mean, that's sort of out there at the age, which is sort of, you know, six stand black belt stuff, right. right. I mean, some, some people go, oh, well, that's really [00:36:00] easy, you know, you know, you should be doing that and why to do, but look, unless you have the fundamentals, right.
Unless you have the foundations, right. Unless you've actually got people confident on the basics of there. Why the hell are you trying? I mean, you know how hard it's just trying to pull data out a building. Yeah. Redline pulled out of a building and connected to a high resolution, you know, 500 O D BI model thing that you're expecting somehow this next generation black belt facilities manager is gonna run and operate and lead and go, yeah, I'm totally good with that, actually.
That why of thing, right? It's just not a reality. Our industry now it is appropriate to some industries and some sectors and some asset owners might prepared to go there cuz they're prepared to invest the time and the skills and the resourcing and the, you know, are prepared to that on the chin. But you know, when you, when you're looking at the, uh, the, the, you know, a baseline capability, um, you gotta get some, you know, some, [00:37:00] some, you know, runs on the runs on the board.
First of all, before we can actually begin to progress that particular level. And for example, in our work, we would much rather you use less technology and implement it well than attempt something, which is so far out there. And as a significantly higher potential to. Yeah, thus put it, throwing everything under the bus, thus the potential for someone to be saying, aha, I told you, so, you know, why have we spent all this money trying to implement something that couldn't be implemented with the skillset we've got.
Right. Because it's even a bit of a leap of faith, assuming somehow that the builder is gonna be capable. Yeah. In a, in the sort of environment, we, we all sort of face globally to be able to pull this off. Right. So it requires. Lot of dedication just in the best of times that alone, assuming the market will kind of figure this out, you know?
Yeah. So it says the hope so says the hopeful specification, people just lying around going, oh, great. Another AI driven [00:38:00] building has just turned up. Right. So mm-hmm, awesome. Yeah. So yeah, a lot of persistence
and, and just to be clear, like obviously I love all of the cutting edge technologies. I'm
sure you did
[00:38:11] James Dice: too.
I could just go deep into it all day, but it's important to then point out that you have prerequisites. To getting to that cutting edge that you must, you must
[00:38:22] Bruce Duyshart: block through. I mean, think of it like a building, right? You can't just build 50 stories on sand, right? You gotta have foundations, you gotta have the fundamentals there in the first place you gotta have, you know, the cyber secure, rigorous, um, you know, ICN there from a network communications perspective, you need the high speed, you know, symmetrical internet services, connecting to that building.
You need the data layer properly organized, properly tagged, properly structured. You need a presentation layer. That's gonna be intuitive and easy to, to, to understand with multiple stakeholders you need, you know, these sorts of things as foundations is your starting point, [00:39:00] right? Mm-hmm before you then go, well, what's the next level.
And you can always come back and improve things. After the fact you get those foundations. Right. But if you haven't got them right, then you've just got this veneer of an approach. I mean, part of this is I call it manager by airline magazine, right. Is where, where people come in with this, you know, great idea.
It is like, oh, I've just read that. So, and so is doing a digital twin. We need to be doing digital twins, like. Uh, we haven't even done our first smart building. We haven't done our, you know, anything yet. We don't even, you know, baby stamps haven't done anything at all, but I wanna do, you know, something out there, which is just a, you know, a, a plaque on the wall or some sort of amazing thing.
Uh, but haven't yet sort of gone down the road of understanding how does this all work and what does it take to, to achieve totally. Well, all let's go what it takes to achieve the
[00:39:53] James Dice: let's, let's go through the different phases of a project with you guys. So through them [00:40:00] questions about each of them for you.
So let's go back the strategy phase. You talked about what is, what does the
[00:40:08] Bruce Duyshart: strategy stage there? Well, look, we start up with sort of, sort of education and communication around what sort of things you can actually do. So, you know, kinda run a. Get a shared vision happening. Mm-hmm um, understand what the, you know, what, what the end outcome is gonna look like.
Right. So, um, and at that point, you need to understand really what are the types of technologies that can actually be used. What's all, what does it mean? Um, and, uh, help them with the cost process, really. So to understand how much is this actually going to, to, to cost preemptively, most cost planners, you know, estimators are not good at this so we actually go through the whole process to, to help unpack that and understand what that is.
And we, we're pretty accurate in our, our estimates, you know, over time of what that actually looks like,
[00:40:52] James Dice: the cost estimates. Are you doing cost compared to status quo of, of the vision that they [00:41:00] have?
[00:41:00] Bruce Duyshart: Uh, how does that work again? Which, which again is a bit of a moving target, uh, as well. So what is status quo, right?
Are you comparing it to a building that is similar in nature that has done, for example, mobile access control or is a standard access. Right. Yeah. So there's always been a component which is gonna be a Delta to what is business usual or is it a brand new technology that they haven't considered before?
So for example, in this building, you've got people counters or IQ, sensors never been done before. Not a thing. Well, that's a part of a, you know, a technology uplift cost, right? So basically you're looking at Delta some way, at least some ability to articulate, um, a cost associated with it and kind you're scrutinizing back for the cost that include.
I'm not quite sure. usually the response you get back. So it's a little bit underwhelming, but, um, you know, at least they're increasingly getting aware of the topic [00:42:00] areas. Yeah. Mm-hmm um, and, and, um, but that's where kind our, you know, the experience that you need to understand, you know, how things actually get priced by, you know, contractors and so forth coming to play.
So at that particular point, you know, um, and we help articulate that, um, through a range of, of different, uh, ways and showing, you know, visually, you know, the master plan or, uh, with a kind of reverse brief, uh, as well, which basically encapsulate all that sort of thinking, uh, and being able to communicate the stakeholders.
This is what we plan to do essentially. So another way of articulating the strategy, part of it is sort of describing as a concept design stage. So that concept design stage, you really wanna have everybody on the same page and saying, No, you're not the outcome we're looking for here. Things that help to improve safety, security, sustainability, placemaking wellbeing, et cetera.
Yep. Mm-hmm and everybody is on the same in terms of investment, uh, and effort that will be required to do that's that's first around strategy. The next stage is design. [00:43:00] Uh, and typically we would take carriage of all the, uh, specialist technology areas on there as well. And, uh, we will look after things around the specifications for things such as the independent data layer.
This is another terminology that actually is confusing the whole industry. So we need to, to land on this independent, you know, I S P O I P. Me. I dunno, you know, it comes up with these different terminologies that people haven't quite stuck, but I think your, the description of an independent data layer is probably the best conceptual description of, of that as well.
But, you know, and there's multiple ways you can go around to it and increasing by the day, the, the Methodism and approaches that you can take to the architecture of that type of platform as well. But, uh, dashboards, uh, you know, so all the specialist technologies will take carriage of, and then also we need to provide some level of input to the services, engineers designs as well, who may or may not depending on their skillset, [00:44:00] understand what's required.
If the outcome is a smart building mm-hmm so that's detailed design, essentially getting it to a point when it goes out to market. That the market will understand and be able to easily interpret what is required from a technology perspective, um, in the same way that they're also understanding from a sustainability perspective, because there will be ESD consultant, for example, um, that is involved in defining what's required for them to achieve, you know, lead or green star or whatever.
It's OK. So you've got a technology component, you've got a sustainability component, you got your normal service component. And then hopefully the builder is in a position where they can actually understand what is required. What are the contractors they'll need? What are the proposed technologies that are on the, the text back, et C.
Uh, and ideally, you know how those different systems and approaches will be packaged mm-hmm across different contractors for it to work. So at that point, um, the project will have been, uh, [00:45:00] tendered. Um, and can I ask you a real quick follow up? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:45:04] James Dice: So you and I were having dinner at RealCom. We were stuffing our faces with tops and our mutual friend Tyson.
He said, he said, so Tysons, he said, Bruce writes the best specifications. Can you? And I wrote
[00:45:20] Bruce Duyshart: that down. Can you,
[00:45:23] James Dice: can you gimme some, like, how do you write the best specifications?
[00:45:26] Bruce Duyshart: And like, what are the best specifications? Well, the best specification is actually understanding how the thing gets built. Okay.
Yeah. At the end of the day, right? I mean, you, you have to put yourself in the contractor's shoes and go, well, what is it they need to know? And you look at a lot of specifications and there's just like, what is that? I mean, don't, you don't need to tell 'em about the standards and, and all that kinda stuff.
Right. So, um, that's perhaps not helpful. So I guess, you know, it's really, um, helping [00:46:00] contractors to price the job fairly and going back to this human engineering aspect of, of it. Right. So when people don't understand, there's a saying, you know, where it's mystery there's margin, right. Mm-hmm and, and, and people will price accordingly if a builder or contractor's looking at something, they don't understand.
It's like how that work. Mm-hmm I better raise my price to cover that because it doesn't end up the way that I think it's gonna come out rather, then I'm gonna get in trouble here. Right? Yeah. So it has, there has to be clarity around what's actually, you know, required. Um, and, um, yeah, being articulated a way that's just, yeah.
Easy, easy to interpret. Got it. Got it. Can you gimme an example
[00:46:39] James Dice: of something, like if you were writing a spec for the independent data layer, for instance, what would be something that would have to be in that to
[00:46:46] Bruce Duyshart: make that buildable? Of course, of course, of course. You've yeah, of course. You've, you've focused in on the trickiest.
One of all I had to simply because yeah, simply because there are emerging [00:47:00] a range of different architectures around this, and this is, I think, where it is actually getting quite tricky in the industry is, is I, what we, what we're doing here is a specification for the, what is it you need to do now, MSI, it's gonna come down to, well, how independent are they actually, in terms of the solutions they're gonna choose now, the definition of an.
Is someone who's able to integrate a whole range of different in their opinion, best practice technology systems together to help produce that. So in the network engineering world and integrate will go, well, we're gonna use this type of firewall, which might be different from all the Ciscos switches, for example, right?
And the reason why we use that particular firewall, because it's manageability, it's price point it's security levels, it's equivalent something. So rather than just buying one brand for everything you're going, look, we know that it's compatible because of these protocols and that we can actually integrate, you know, use that there.
It's easy to [00:48:00] integrate it. Save time, etcetera C. Now an integrator should be doing the same sort of thing now, but. That MSI turns out to be an agent for only one product. And the architecture of that particular product says that it has to go this particular way, then your ability to, you know, so, and we sort of, you know, we we're like Switzerland, right?
We have to be like Switzerland. Yeah. And so, okay, well look, we gotta play this, whether it's not gonna be leading down a path or it must be this particular, it must be, you know, this particular technology solution. And so, you know, the, the, the skill around this is coming up with, you know, supporting the principles of open standards, open systems, you knowability understanding, you know, OPEX costs and all those types of areas on there as well.
So it has to be written in a way that it's, it. Outcome focused. Yeah. Standards based in its approach and with enough flexibility there to allow the MSI to do what [00:49:00] they know best. Yeah. In terms of the way you actually procure and implement the particular system. And also ultimately is acting in the best interests of the asset owner, uh, at the end of the day, you know, trying to escape from the kind of technology technology's sake, you know, is there really a reason to capture this much data for the sake of capturing, you know, that much data.
Right. Does it really make economic sense to go through the pain of trying to capture the 90 points that are available to you in a smart meter? Right. When really we only need six. Yeah. Right. So putting a measure on it in a way that. Technology can be solved in many ways you can do there's more the way way's gonna account.
Right? So what's the most prudent economic way of going about doing is, is I think key. Yeah. To, to, to writing, uh, these specifications in a, in a way that that helps everybody win. Right? So you're doing the right thing by the owner. You're doing the right thing by the [00:50:00] builder. And you're not just punishing people for the sake of punishing people.
Cause you've got no idea. And for the points of data, I would just do everything. Right. So yeah, ultimately that doesn't doesn't go well.
[00:50:11] James Dice: okay. I, I interrupted you before the
[00:50:13] Bruce Duyshart: implementation phase. Uh, yeah, so I think, you know, at that point there, it's just really, uh, at the end of that procurement process, you know, talking with the builders, making sure that they understand what's involved talking with, um, they usually have a services engineer or someone like that that will be respons systems, you know, do they really properly understand what's involved in here?
Do they have the skill? Do they need a hand more often than not? They will need a hand in being able to, you know, steer through the process and understand what their contractors are doing because you know, you know, tenders are very time, pressure thing right back to this human condition's like, you know, has a builder seeing this sort of type of specification for the first time.
And they're kinda quiet on the inside freaking out. Yeah. Um, you know, are they admitting that [00:51:00] they're freaking out or they're just going, oh, we've got this we're good. And then out they're not good. They're you there's, which is very interesting transition from the point you through. You know, contractor X has got the job and then all, then, then, then the conversations come out going.
Yeah, we're gonna need a hand with this one.
but you know, we, we sure we're we assure people it's fine. Right? I mean, this is the journey that everyone's going on. Right. I think the mistake here is to say, I know it all mm-hmm right. I know, I know everything. Right. Um, because, um, it can be a recipe for disaster, so, and that's really what the implementation process is all about.
Right. It it's getting away from the, well, I assumed, right. Mm-hmm never assumed the assumptions that you think are in people's heads. Right? So the process here is to really go through and, and make sure that [00:52:00] that the builder is organized, structured, you know, is procuring at the right time. Um, you know, has got the right contractors on board, the contractors getting the right products, you know, they're presenting the right samples, the right level of testing's happening, you know, allowing for Murphy's law.
Um, um, and you know, the things can and will go wrong, you know, uh, and allowing think a lot of people suffer what I call optimism bias. Yeah. Yeah. How hard could it be? Well, actually hard. Right. But it's more to do with coordination, right. So, you know, one, one trade might get it, but the others simply do not, and they don't really understand the implications of what they're doing.
You know, take smart S for example, there's a knock on effect. It just looks a simple hydraulic thing, but actually now you've got network cabling involved. You've got, you know, mechanical or trying to report either back net or some other sort of, you know, communications. Protocol's gotta go to some other network, you know, suddenly the [00:53:00] plumbers going well, I mean, another, another world here, all of a sudden thought this back in climbing school, I never thought this would happen.
Right. So , so how does that work? Right. So you have to sort of help sort of steer that process, you know, through, and that's, that's, you know, what our guys actually are really good at is helping builders, you know, and then ultimately reporting back to the owners, um, that this is actually what's going on.
Yeah, yeah. This is actually how it's working and, and, and, uh, and so forth. So got it. Implementation is a pretty sort of interesting process, you know, leading all the way up to practical, um, completion where everybody wants everything sort of working on the day, um, at handover. So the first part of it, and then just.
Hand of that process to hand over to, uh, facility managers and make sure they understand how operate this building, which now has these 40 technologies in it compared to the six that they used to have rock off tongue rocks off, does human, human engineering. Right. [00:54:00] uh,
[00:54:01] James Dice: so I think one of the things people struggle with with all the, that process, you just took everyone through is the different roles of the people that aren't core contractors, right?
So there's like the consultant role that you guys are playing. There's the design engineers role. There's the MSI role. There's the commissioning agent role. All of those are kind of like in a way they're all kind of like service provider consultant type
[00:54:28] Bruce Duyshart: of. Professionals.
[00:54:30] James Dice: Right. So how do you delineate between all of those on the projects
[00:54:34] Bruce Duyshart: that, that you work on?
Well, well, that's a very important thing we, you know, to do, and that's what we establish our that's that's in the mind,
all these people, people , you know, what do they all do? Right. So the education process starts right there. So they need to be educated as to look here's what we do. [00:55:00] Here's what they do. In some cases, we are the lead on a certain topic, and then we will provide input to someone else's design. Right. Okay. In other cases, they are the they're the lead like the MEP consultant, right?
They're the lead, but we'll provide some input to the design that they're coming up with. And I think as long as those demarcation lines are actually clear upfront, uh, in the same way, as it's clear what an ESD consultant is actually doing, for example, um, you know, and how they're interacting, what access they were required.
And when that's all clear, upfront, and through the course of a project, then you don't have either double up or complete misses where no one's got it. And so if everyone's on the same page as to their roles and responsibilities over the course of a project, then the outcome is much. Got it. And then, so
[00:55:47] James Dice: specifically on the MSI piece, how do you guys, how do you sort of think about on a normal project when there's an MSI?
Like, what do you guys do and what do they do? Can you describe
[00:55:57] Bruce Duyshart: yeah. That, that process? Yeah. Well, it, it [00:56:00] it's a scale thing. And I think the biggest thing that we bring to the table, obviously, right. The specification for the first place and going to things, we were talking previously methodology about how they're doing things, but it's just applying the rigor and coordination.
And, uh, and time and cost effective in what, in what they're doing so that, so we helping to get the ducks all sort of all lined up in a way that actually sort of, they're getting timely information way. They're not going, where is this guy? That's meant to be the contractor. So, and so doing something, you know, then, then, um, those things are being coordinated in a way that, you know, that there's stuff being procured the matter, because look, their focus really is on the, this independent data layer, right?
Mm-hmm the presentation layer of how that all comes together. Right? So the more they can focus that and less on the. You know, where's, where's the system, where's the contractor. Who do I talk to? How's that all work, you know, [00:57:00] etcetera. Then they can really focus on the, the core deliverable, which is around the technology and so forth.
Yeah. Then, um, that makes everything sort of flow together. Cause we managing the, the client up one end, you know, the next incoming facilities manager, the, you know, uh, it might be a, a, you know, tenant, you know, rep manager or leasing agents. There's a whole lot of people that need to understand everything that's going on or about to happen on this particular project.
And everything's all been caught away. Then, then we can be, we can provide greater clarity around what the deliverables actually will look like. Mm-hmm, , we're gathering requirements a little bit along the way in that process. Well, helping to feed the MSI with timely information so they can do the best possible job.
Got it. Yeah. So basically just, I. Got
[00:57:49] James Dice: it. Cool. So let's tie this together. I'd love to hear about one project in particular that comes to mind like a case study. Can you tell us a story around, like [00:58:00] a specific building on this, this specifically, I'm curious about the 80, 20 thing, like who were the key humans that had to be brought along and yeah.
How
[00:58:10] Bruce Duyshart: did you sort of make it happen? Sure. I mean, I, I know that just before we started here, we said, okay, well, let's pull out one building. Right. But it's a bit like, sort of saying which, which one's your favorite? Which, which one's your favorite child, right? Yeah. Or it's, or, or it's a bit like saying, which is the smartest building in the world.
Right. You know? Yeah. It's like, well, you know, there's elements of different building. Yeah, where you know, which, which was good and bad. So, I mean, I talk across some of, sort of the issues that we see, which is probably more, more interest to
this process where, you know, education stake is really key. So, um, think really sort of, um, you know, getting things coordinated and, and aligned and, and so forth in the, in the documentation processes [00:59:00] is, is really sort of you critical. Um, but in, in construction, um, things happen that require a of attention to a success product.
So even products with all these different things going on and things are being signed off cetera, you walk in the comms room and it's like, hang on, we've got a whole bin model that's building and I'm seeing trade waste pipes going through the comms room. How does this happen? Right. So building, but winning
site
must done that. Alright. Okay. Yeah. We'll just get them to move it. Right. But just so much stuff sort of happens. That's unexpected. Mm-hmm so, yeah. Um, there's that delivery process there across the board that can occur and it's the diligence appli to the way it gets delivered. So [01:00:00] at the end of the day, um, these things do actually come, come together, but requires an enormous amount of, of, of work and facilitation.
And we've, we've got a number of building that multiple, um, awards, like G exchange in Adelaide. We did. And, um, you know, even sort of going through the process of writing the award submission. You do begin to realize the enor of the effort that was required all the way from the very beginning to, you know, have a client that is able to set a vision properly that sort of says, well, you know, help them to create that vision.
You know, probably more the case. They understand, look, they have an aspiration, we wanna do this articulate, you know, what are the benefits actually, being able to articulate those benefits back, you know, really, really clearly is important to making sure that you've got a team that actually works. So, you know, I think the successful projects are the ones where there is a there's the, there is a great.
You know, in there throughout the [01:01:00] delivery process and understanding and working with the, because you're there to help. I think a perception from a lot of builders is there pain in
are doing all this technology stuff you're just describing to me. And I'm having to get water meters of a type that we've never used before. I'm having to get my contract to do things in terms of pulling data. We never had to worry about before. So we were just talking about this the other day in, in, in our work in progress meeting there about the process when creating a smart building is now putting onto. The construction and delivery process of a building that has never been there before.
Totally mm-hmm you, you were talking about the role of an independent commissioning agent. Now the independent commissioning agent, their sole purpose of being there is to make sure that a BMS actually has been a [01:02:00] mechanical, mechanical plant has been delivered to a standard. That's gonna meet specifications, gonna meet the standards that are required, et cetera, cetera.
Now this is now being required for technology. So for the first time, a lot of.
Are being scrutinized as to the quality of the work of the systems that they're actually delivering. Right. So for the first time there's someone looking over their shoulder and saying, is your people counting system actually counting all, all the number of people they're building accurately. Yeah. Has it been commissioned properly?
Are we getting data out of these, you know, electric vehicle charges properly in the right way? Can we actually understand, you know, the faults in there or one of the data points associated with the car parking system, you know, is it working? So there's a lens now. That we're applying across multiple systems for an entire building, which we are calling a smart building in a process that's never been done before.
I think this is, this is somewhat confronting, as you could imagine for a lot of people, right. That a, I think a lot of people [01:03:00] don't inherently understand the way buildings actually work in the first place. They just understand. Oh yeah. To working. Yep. Access control to working seems to working is
keying accurately something, oh, it's not something else. So, you know, in a way that I think the good thing about the technology and the data layer and so forth there is your independently validating that each of these different systems that the owner is actually investing. Is actually working and working optimally, which then comes back to the definition of a smart building.
Although building is able to continuously improve its performance over time. So unless you've actually created an environment where you can actually improve that point and understand that here's your line, the sand, and from this point forward, we can actually improve upon that. Yeah. Um, it, it it's a real [01:04:00] challenge, right?
So the success. Project coming back to the original sort of question is the project where that team is actually working together with a shared vision that says, look, this is the outcome we, we, we actually need, it's not just a tick in the box that says, yeah, system X has been implemented. Good. Excellent.
I'll see you later. Let me know, happens within the defect liability period. It's like, no, no, no. This all has to work together in a way. So therefore it has to be understood by the contractors when the moment they're engaged. Yeah. But this is the outcome we are looking for, you know, and that's where the successful products actually happened because everyone was able to.
Understand that that is that there's the outcome that's actually gonna be required here. And, um, you know, when you go through that process and actually able to ascertain that all these things did actually occur, um, that, you know, and you can articulate that in a way that that demonstrates to other people, but that's the case.
Then you have a successful project on your hands, but it doesn't end there. Obviously it, you know, it all then comes down the line. Um, and the handover to the operations team is [01:05:00] really, really important. And you, you need those gems of people, which is the generation of professionals that I think we genuinely need in the industry board, all this use of technology, right?
Mm-hmm um, that, that that's, you know, we, the industry's crying out for you. You know, if you, if you wanna do your digital. Well, you better find the right guy that understands how to, uh, the implications of running a building. That actually is a digital twin because it's, uh, it's it's complex, right?
Absolutely. Um, absolutely.
[01:05:32] James Dice: Bob, Bruce, this has been awesome. Let's let's close with some carve outs. So my carve out's easy. It's your book? Smarter buildings, better experiences. I'll put that link to the book and the show notes. People definitely check it out. Uh what's
[01:05:45] Bruce Duyshart: what's yours though. I mean, I listen to a whole bunch of different sort of podcasts on different. I listen to a podcast called fully charged, which is around electric vehicles, electr of transport and so forth, which leads to all sorts of things around battery sort of technology side. I thought that's [01:06:00] on the nerds side of thing.
Business wars is awesome. So there's a great lot of narratives around there, you know, Coke versus Pepsi and, you know, Uber versus Lyft and things like that, which is pretty, you know, awesome. Uh, there's a, there's another sort of. Awesome sort of tech one called, um, interesting called another podcast. uh, who just, uh, these sort of Silicon valley, um, analysts are talking about, you know, all the latest sort of tech and so going on there, top myself up with that every now and again, um, there's one called 99% invisible mm-hmm
Um, which is, which is pretty awesome. Um, just lot of to do with, you know, either design and built environment and, you know, it's a nice sort of steady pace talking about things that are going on the world, on the music front. I, you know, I like listening to, a lot of, sort of, uh, you know, electronic sort of, you know, house, uh, progressive, no.
OK. All stuff like that as well. So to like elk, so [01:07:00] he, somewhere around the, so all.
Horror of other people who, well, for me, horror of other people who just have, you know, not as progressive music taste. Yeah. Yeah. uh, that's great. I'll have to put those in the show too. Yeah. Pretty, pretty, pretty mixed. I'll send you those links on there as well, but you know, sometimes it's, it's, it's good to be out there on, on different fronts as well.
You not just the straight tech and business as well, but on music as well. So yeah, I enjoy that. Love it. Love it.
[01:07:37] James Dice: Making the, making the podcast more, more groovy
[01:07:40] Bruce Duyshart: there you, so Bruce,
[01:07:44] James Dice: well coming on the show, it's been
[01:07:46] Bruce Duyshart: a pleasure. No, no worries. Thanks James.
[01:07:52] James Dice: All right friends, thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus Podcast. For more episodes like this and to get the weekly Nexus Newsletter, which [01:08:00] by the way, readers have said is the best way to stay up to date on the future of the smart building industry, please subscribe at nexuslabs.online. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. Have a great day.
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