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Bringing new construction into the Connected Buildings program
This article is part of our Building Owner Signal series. We're highlighting patterns we see across conversations with building owners. These short insights focus on operational risks, emerging priorities, and what owner teams should pay attention to now.
Last week, I heard a familiar story from an owner in our community. Every time a new building is built, the inherited tech stack is a big surprise. That's why they now manage five different lighting control systems across the portfolio. 😬
The industry has been arguing about how to construct smarter buildings for years—Division 25, integrators wanting earlier involvement, consultants pitching their frameworks, prefab vendors pushing integration upstream.
While progress is being made, we keep hearing about owners in operational departments inheriting three main problems from their construction counterparts:
1. Important capabilities get value-engineered out of the project. Example: your energy management team can't analyze air handling unit performance because there aren't any mixed-air temperature sensors.
2. The construction team installs tech that makes operations more difficult. Example: your maintenance team needs to change 500 wireless sensor batteries 2 weeks after the warranty period expires. They didn't have that cost in the budget.
3. The right tech gets installed, but the handover gets botched. Example: no one knows what circuits those 200 submeters are measuring. The data is useless without that context.
These themes stem from one structural problem: The development team was disconnected from the Connected Buildings program.
Every department—FM, Energy, OT, Security, Sustainability—operates with its own systems, standards, and practices. When a new building joins the portfolio, each department needs it to plug straight into what they already have. Your Connected Buildings program is how you make sure that happens—gathering each department's operational requirements and carrying them through design, construction, and handover.
All the tools owners already use to manage new construction—specs, OPRs, owner's reps, MSIs, commissioning—need to be informed by the program's operational requirements. Without that connection, the OPR is just a list of use cases; the spec is copied and pasted from the last job; commissioning runs a generic checklist; and the owner's rep optimizes for project closeout rather than user onboarding.
Peter O'Connor (IT Director, Inova Health System) and Sia Dabiri (Senior Associate, Altura) walked through how Inova does this at scale in our January 2026 NexusCast: five hospitals, ~45,000 OT devices, 1.5 million square feet of active construction. They noticed that unvetted devices were making their way onto the network through the "construction loophole." Their construction governance program closes it.
The standards Inova built encode what their existing IT and cyber practices require of any vendor coming into the environment: cybersecurity guidelines baked into contractor agreements (with a $10M cyber-liability policy that gets contractor attention), no third-party networks or vendor-supplied switches, and a vendor laptop policy where any device touching Inova systems is provisioned by Inova. The IT team—with Altura translating between IT, cyber, and facilities—vets every construction submittal against those standards.
A Connected Buildings program reaches into capital projects at four key moments. Each one is a session in the new Connected Construction track at NexusCon Detroit this October:
1. BoD, Technical Design & Coordination: encoding each department's operating plan into the design before bid.
2. Procurement, Bid Packaging & QA/QC: enforcing those plans through the bid process and on the job site.
3. Tech-Enabled Commissioning: validating the building systems against those plans continuously, using FDD and advanced supervisory control.
4. Digital Commissioning & Handover: standing up the building's digital infrastructure and handing it over for each department to maintain.
The Connected Construction track will work best when owners bring their development PMs alongside their FM, Energy, OT, Security, and Sustainability leads. Register now
💬 Hit Reply
What tech surprises have you inherited from a recent new-construction project? Fill out our building owner concierge form and let us know your story.
This article is part of our Building Owner Signal series. We're highlighting patterns we see across conversations with building owners. These short insights focus on operational risks, emerging priorities, and what owner teams should pay attention to now.
Last week, I heard a familiar story from an owner in our community. Every time a new building is built, the inherited tech stack is a big surprise. That's why they now manage five different lighting control systems across the portfolio. 😬
The industry has been arguing about how to construct smarter buildings for years—Division 25, integrators wanting earlier involvement, consultants pitching their frameworks, prefab vendors pushing integration upstream.
While progress is being made, we keep hearing about owners in operational departments inheriting three main problems from their construction counterparts:
1. Important capabilities get value-engineered out of the project. Example: your energy management team can't analyze air handling unit performance because there aren't any mixed-air temperature sensors.
2. The construction team installs tech that makes operations more difficult. Example: your maintenance team needs to change 500 wireless sensor batteries 2 weeks after the warranty period expires. They didn't have that cost in the budget.
3. The right tech gets installed, but the handover gets botched. Example: no one knows what circuits those 200 submeters are measuring. The data is useless without that context.
These themes stem from one structural problem: The development team was disconnected from the Connected Buildings program.
Every department—FM, Energy, OT, Security, Sustainability—operates with its own systems, standards, and practices. When a new building joins the portfolio, each department needs it to plug straight into what they already have. Your Connected Buildings program is how you make sure that happens—gathering each department's operational requirements and carrying them through design, construction, and handover.
All the tools owners already use to manage new construction—specs, OPRs, owner's reps, MSIs, commissioning—need to be informed by the program's operational requirements. Without that connection, the OPR is just a list of use cases; the spec is copied and pasted from the last job; commissioning runs a generic checklist; and the owner's rep optimizes for project closeout rather than user onboarding.
Peter O'Connor (IT Director, Inova Health System) and Sia Dabiri (Senior Associate, Altura) walked through how Inova does this at scale in our January 2026 NexusCast: five hospitals, ~45,000 OT devices, 1.5 million square feet of active construction. They noticed that unvetted devices were making their way onto the network through the "construction loophole." Their construction governance program closes it.
The standards Inova built encode what their existing IT and cyber practices require of any vendor coming into the environment: cybersecurity guidelines baked into contractor agreements (with a $10M cyber-liability policy that gets contractor attention), no third-party networks or vendor-supplied switches, and a vendor laptop policy where any device touching Inova systems is provisioned by Inova. The IT team—with Altura translating between IT, cyber, and facilities—vets every construction submittal against those standards.
A Connected Buildings program reaches into capital projects at four key moments. Each one is a session in the new Connected Construction track at NexusCon Detroit this October:
1. BoD, Technical Design & Coordination: encoding each department's operating plan into the design before bid.
2. Procurement, Bid Packaging & QA/QC: enforcing those plans through the bid process and on the job site.
3. Tech-Enabled Commissioning: validating the building systems against those plans continuously, using FDD and advanced supervisory control.
4. Digital Commissioning & Handover: standing up the building's digital infrastructure and handing it over for each department to maintain.
The Connected Construction track will work best when owners bring their development PMs alongside their FM, Energy, OT, Security, and Sustainability leads. Register now
💬 Hit Reply
What tech surprises have you inherited from a recent new-construction project? Fill out our building owner concierge form and let us know your story.
This is a great piece!
I agree.