“Smart building” is one of those phrases that sounds great—until you try to do something with it.
It implies a binary: buildings are either smart or they’re not. But anyone in the trenches of building operations knows that’s not how it works. You don’t flip a switch and suddenly run a building on AI.
What actually happens—across office portfolios, retail chains, schools, and hotels—is a slow, uneven, often frustrating progression. One department solves a problem with cloud software. Another sticks to their spreadsheet. One building gets fault detection. Others are still doing rounds with a clipboard.
This article is about the organizations working through that mess—building smarter and smarter operations, one step at a time. It’s about what it really takes to get from duct-taped workflows to something that resembles the vision the term “smart buildings” was attempting to invoke: integrated, collaborative, cloud-native, AI-ready operations.
When we look across all the interviews we’ve done and case studies we’ve published, we see a shared pattern emerging—a kind of roadmap that more and more organizations are following, whether they realize it or not.
It starts with small wins and builds toward a future where systems talk to each other, teams work from the same data, and automation handles the stuff that used to eat up hours of staff time.
This is our first crack at synthesizing and naming that roadmap.
Every smart building journey begins with a reality check on the status quo. Stage 0 is where many organizations find themselves today—a world of manual workflows, isolated systems, and technology that isn’t pulling its weight. Key characteristics of this stage include:
In this stage, day-to-day firefighting dominates. The thought of overhauling building operations can feel overwhelming to an understaffed facilities team. People stick to familiar habits (“it’s always been done this way”) not because they don’t see inefficiencies, but because they lack the bandwidth and support to change.
The challenge—and the opportunity—is to find a starting point that breaks the cycle, and then keep that momentum going.
Stage 1 begins when a team wrangles one of those silos. Rather than trying to “boil the ocean,” it starts small by digitizing a single system in a way that adds real value. The key is choosing a system that is both operationally important and relatively self-contained, making it a good candidate for a pilot project.
A prime example is domestic hot water (DHW) in hotels. As Brandon Matthies of Nexa (which helps digitize such systems) explained, not all buildings even have a central building automation system (BAS) today, especially in hospitality or smaller facilities. Yet they still have critical needs.
“In a hotel… you need a hot shower and you need a bed… that’s all that matters,” Matthies noted, underscoring why hot water systems were their first target for digitization. By outfitting a hotel’s DHW loops with sensors and cloud-connected controls, the facilities team gains real-time visibility and alerts for issues like temperature and pressure drops—a huge improvement over waiting for guests to report a problem.
The Stage 1 mindset is to learn to walk before you run. Pick one high-value system and connect it. Demonstrate tangible ROI (e.g. fewer complaints, lower energy use, avoided downtime) on a small scale. This builds trust in the technology and enthusiasm for expanding it.
As Metron’s Ellie Graeden explained, the moment a device (like a water meter in Metron’s case) is digitized and brought to the cloud, a vendor can begin applying domain-specific AI to that data—recognizing “what normal looks like” for that system or site and flagging anomalies without human review.
At Stage 1, the organization starts to tweak its workflows around those signals: staff begin checking a digital dashboard each morning instead of running around with a clipboard, and responding to automated alerts instead of discovering issues days later. In Matthies’ experience, the first step is often changing where the team gets its information—moving from reactive, local checks to a cloud-based source of truth.
That cultural shift, even for one system, lays the groundwork for bigger changes ahead.
After proving out a connected solution in one or a few pilot locations, the next step is scaling that solution across the portfolio. Stage 2 is about taking the initial success—whether it’s smart hot water management, fault detection & diagnostics for HVAC, or something else—and rolling it out as a new standard practice in all relevant buildings.
This moves the organization from an isolated experiment to enterprise-level adoption of a connected workflow.
The hotel operator that digitized hot water in a handful of properties, for instance, decided to deploy the Nexa solution across their entire portfolio. “We are in the process of installing 20 sites now and have budgeted the expansion of the rest of the portfolio which is over three times that by the end of the year,” Matthies said. With all their hotels on the same platform, the corporate engineering team can monitor water usage and performance portfolio-wide, and every site is benefiting from the lessons learned during the pilot.
British Land, a major office landlord in the UK, provides another Stage 2 example. They began by implementing Facilio’s fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) tool for HVAC in a subset of buildings, aiming to cut energy waste and catch equipment issues early.
Once the approach was validated, they expanded it. Now every office property in their portfolio uses the same FDD and meter analytics software, with a common set of energy performance dashboards and reports. This standardization created a baseline for what “good” operation looks like across all sites.
Water metering offers another clear example. As Metron’s Graeden put it, “if you are looking across your portfolio… you can actually use those data (to identify) a high performer or a low performer, and if they’ve had recent issues, alerts, leaks and so forth.” The same anomaly signal that helps a single facility manager optimize day-to-day workflows becomes a portfolio-wide KPI, enabling managers to compare sites and rank performance without diving into the domain’s technical details.
By focusing on one clear problem (in British Land’s case, HVAC energy efficiency) and solving it across the portfolio, they created a template for tackling the next problem. Each successful rollout trains the organization—users get comfortable with new tools, executives see metrics trending in the right direction, and skepticism gives way to curiosity about what else could be improved.
By the end of Stage 2, one or two systems are now cloud-managed and operated in a data-driven way everywhere. The organization has proven to itself that operational tech can work and deliver value.
Still, many other systems (and other departments) remain in their old silos…
In Stage 3, the scope of Connected Operations widens. It’s no longer about just one system, but multiple building systems integrated on a common platform, at least within a single department’s purview. The prototypical scenario is a facilities management team unifying its various tools into one cohesive operations center.
Continuing the earlier example, the hotel portfolio isn’t planning to stop at hot water in their partnership with Nexa. After that first phase, they began layering on additional use cases—adding cooling tower performance, leak detection sensors, and even water usage visibility to the same cloud platform. Now the engineering team can use one interface to oversee domestic water, cooling, leaks, and water usage.
In other cases, the driver for Stage 3 is simplifying a messy tech stack. Saruf Alam of KODE Labs describes clients who just want their daily workflow to be easier. “They have operators who can’t jump from building to building, because everything looks different… Their ask is so simple: ‘Can you just bring all of this into one place? Give me consistent graphics, give me a consistent interface,’” Alam says.
It’s a push for consistency and efficiency—“a pure productivity play”. By using a cloud platform to abstract away the differences between, say, ten different building automation systems, these organizations make life much easier for their staff. A chief engineer no longer needs to remember five logins or train junior techs on multiple UIs; everything from HVAC to lighting looks and works similarly across the portfolio.
Leading real estate operators like QuadReal have embraced this approach. Alam notes that QuadReal “standardized on a set of five to six reports and KPIs” for all their buildings, so that every operator is looking at the same problems in the same way and knows the same exact steps to improve them.” That consistency is powerful: it means best practices can be replicated everywhere, and performance can be benchmarked uniformly.
British Land, meanwhile, isn’t stopping at Stage 2 either. As their maturity increased, they began layering on occupancy data onto Facilio’s platform to fine-tune their co-working operations, where booking data could be connected to real-time occupancy trends to adjust temperature setpoints, optimize ventilation, or even open or close zones of a building. They also integrated lighting control systems, allowing for demand-based lighting schedules that drove additional energy savings on top of the HVAC gains.
These incremental expansions show how once the data layer infrastructure is in place, new use cases can be added with less friction, enabling the organization to manage multiple systems from a shared platform and deepen the ROI from earlier investments.
By Stage 3, an organization has effectively created a Connected Operations hub for a single department. With this solid, standardized operational backbone in place, the stage is set to extend the benefits to other parts of the organization.
[Members can log in to read more about stage 4, Empire State Realty Trust's journey past stage 3, and get the checklist for moving from stage to stage!]
Stage 4 is where the old boundaries between departments start to dissolve, enabled by shared data and tools. The operations team begins to work hand-in-hand with groups like sustainability and workplace experience through a common platform. Sometimes, it starts in another department that needs facilities to actually change the day-to-day MO.
A compelling example comes from KODE Labs' partnership with Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT). ESRT’s sustainability managers were trying to curtail energy use during peak demand events, but they lacked a direct line of sight into what the building engineers and systems were doing in real time.
By giving both teams a shared cloud experience, that changed. Suddenly, “the sustainability team could see what the BMS was doing, and the operators could see real-time kilowatts,” Alam explains. With everyone operating in sync, they even automated the demand-response actions—instead of phone calls and manual overrides, a single platform command now trims building load when needed.
Another illustration comes from British Land’s recent efforts with Facilio. After years of parallel initiatives (FDD for energy management on one side, maintenance on the other), they replaced their CMMS with Facilio’s cloud-based platform to unify work.
It still took about three years to get the sustainability and facilities teams truly aligned, but now they’re piloting condition-based maintenance—using FDD insights to trigger work orders only when conditions warrant, rather than on a fixed schedule.
Across every stage of this journey—from digitizing a single system to full cross-department automation—one enabler shows up again and again: the cloud. It’s the first real inflection point.
Without cloud connectivity, data stays trapped on-site, locked in vendor-specific silos, and remains inaccessible to anyone outside the building. Once systems move to the cloud, everything else becomes possible: visibility across the portfolio, integration across vendors, standardization across buildings.
Next, standardization allows regional teams to manage five buildings with one dashboard, or a sustainability lead to compare HVAC performance across the entire portfolio using consistent KPIs. It’s how teams align around shared metrics and move from firefighting to proactive management. And it’s how building operators stop chasing scattered alarms and start solving real problems.
But tech alone doesn’t make this happen. Progress requires a champion inside the organization—someone who’s willing to rethink how things get done. That person might start by changing how their team prioritizes work orders or how alerts are routed. Over time, they become the bridge between departments, the advocate for scaling what works, the internal engine behind operational maturity.
The champion is the one asking, “Why are we still doing this manually?” and “What would it take to automate this?”
And that’s the final through-line: automation. At first, it looks like basic notifications or scheduled reports. Then it becomes condition-based maintenance, demand response triggers, and eventually—trusted system-level automations that shave hours off workflows every week. Automation isn’t the goal in itself. It’s the outcome of good foundations: clean data, thoughtful integration, aligned teams.
So if you’re in Stage 0 or 1, staring at a mountain of manual chaos, don’t be discouraged. Every Connected Operations program starts there. The difference is whether you have a clear path forward and the momentum to keep it going.
What do you think? Is there a Stage 5 (or beyond) we should add to this? Let us know below in the comments.
Stage 4 is where the old boundaries between departments start to dissolve, enabled by shared data and tools. The operations team begins to work hand-in-hand with groups like sustainability and workplace experience through a common platform. Sometimes, it starts in another department that needs facilities to actually change the day-to-day MO.
A compelling example comes from KODE Labs' partnership with Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT). ESRT’s sustainability managers were trying to curtail energy use during peak demand events, but they lacked a direct line of sight into what the building engineers and systems were doing in real time.
By giving both teams a shared cloud experience, that changed. Suddenly, “the sustainability team could see what the BMS was doing, and the operators could see real-time kilowatts,” Alam explains. With everyone operating in sync, they even automated the demand-response actions—instead of phone calls and manual overrides, a single platform command now trims building load when needed.
Another illustration comes from British Land’s recent efforts with Facilio. After years of parallel initiatives (FDD for energy management on one side, maintenance on the other), they replaced their CMMS with Facilio’s cloud-based platform to unify work.
It still took about three years to get the sustainability and facilities teams truly aligned, but now they’re piloting condition-based maintenance—using FDD insights to trigger work orders only when conditions warrant, rather than on a fixed schedule.
Across every stage of this journey—from digitizing a single system to full cross-department automation—one enabler shows up again and again: the cloud. It’s the first real inflection point.
Without cloud connectivity, data stays trapped on-site, locked in vendor-specific silos, and remains inaccessible to anyone outside the building. Once systems move to the cloud, everything else becomes possible: visibility across the portfolio, integration across vendors, standardization across buildings.
Next, standardization allows regional teams to manage five buildings with one dashboard, or a sustainability lead to compare HVAC performance across the entire portfolio using consistent KPIs. It’s how teams align around shared metrics and move from firefighting to proactive management. And it’s how building operators stop chasing scattered alarms and start solving real problems.
But tech alone doesn’t make this happen. Progress requires a champion inside the organization—someone who’s willing to rethink how things get done. That person might start by changing how their team prioritizes work orders or how alerts are routed. Over time, they become the bridge between departments, the advocate for scaling what works, the internal engine behind operational maturity.
The champion is the one asking, “Why are we still doing this manually?” and “What would it take to automate this?”
And that’s the final through-line: automation. At first, it looks like basic notifications or scheduled reports. Then it becomes condition-based maintenance, demand response triggers, and eventually—trusted system-level automations that shave hours off workflows every week. Automation isn’t the goal in itself. It’s the outcome of good foundations: clean data, thoughtful integration, aligned teams.
So if you’re in Stage 0 or 1, staring at a mountain of manual chaos, don’t be discouraged. Every Connected Operations program starts there. The difference is whether you have a clear path forward and the momentum to keep it going.
What do you think? Is there a Stage 5 (or beyond) we should add to this? Let us know below in the comments.
Stage 4 is where the old boundaries between departments start to dissolve, enabled by shared data and tools. The operations team begins to work hand-in-hand with groups like sustainability and workplace experience through a common platform. Sometimes, it starts in another department that needs facilities to actually change the day-to-day MO.
A compelling example comes from KODE Labs' partnership with Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT). ESRT’s sustainability managers were trying to curtail energy use during peak demand events, but they lacked a direct line of sight into what the building engineers and systems were doing in real time.
By giving both teams a shared cloud experience, that changed. Suddenly, “the sustainability team could see what the BMS was doing, and the operators could see real-time kilowatts,” Alam explains. With everyone operating in sync, they even automated the demand-response actions—instead of phone calls and manual overrides, a single platform command now trims building load when needed.
Another illustration comes from British Land’s recent efforts with Facilio. After years of parallel initiatives (FDD for energy management on one side, maintenance on the other), they replaced their CMMS with Facilio’s cloud-based platform to unify work.
It still took about three years to get the sustainability and facilities teams truly aligned, but now they’re piloting condition-based maintenance—using FDD insights to trigger work orders only when conditions warrant, rather than on a fixed schedule.
Across every stage of this journey—from digitizing a single system to full cross-department automation—one enabler shows up again and again: the cloud. It’s the first real inflection point.
Without cloud connectivity, data stays trapped on-site, locked in vendor-specific silos, and remains inaccessible to anyone outside the building. Once systems move to the cloud, everything else becomes possible: visibility across the portfolio, integration across vendors, standardization across buildings.
Next, standardization allows regional teams to manage five buildings with one dashboard, or a sustainability lead to compare HVAC performance across the entire portfolio using consistent KPIs. It’s how teams align around shared metrics and move from firefighting to proactive management. And it’s how building operators stop chasing scattered alarms and start solving real problems.
But tech alone doesn’t make this happen. Progress requires a champion inside the organization—someone who’s willing to rethink how things get done. That person might start by changing how their team prioritizes work orders or how alerts are routed. Over time, they become the bridge between departments, the advocate for scaling what works, the internal engine behind operational maturity.
The champion is the one asking, “Why are we still doing this manually?” and “What would it take to automate this?”
And that’s the final through-line: automation. At first, it looks like basic notifications or scheduled reports. Then it becomes condition-based maintenance, demand response triggers, and eventually—trusted system-level automations that shave hours off workflows every week. Automation isn’t the goal in itself. It’s the outcome of good foundations: clean data, thoughtful integration, aligned teams.
So if you’re in Stage 0 or 1, staring at a mountain of manual chaos, don’t be discouraged. Every Connected Operations program starts there. The difference is whether you have a clear path forward and the momentum to keep it going.
What do you think? Is there a Stage 5 (or beyond) we should add to this? Let us know below in the comments.
“Smart building” is one of those phrases that sounds great—until you try to do something with it.
It implies a binary: buildings are either smart or they’re not. But anyone in the trenches of building operations knows that’s not how it works. You don’t flip a switch and suddenly run a building on AI.
What actually happens—across office portfolios, retail chains, schools, and hotels—is a slow, uneven, often frustrating progression. One department solves a problem with cloud software. Another sticks to their spreadsheet. One building gets fault detection. Others are still doing rounds with a clipboard.
This article is about the organizations working through that mess—building smarter and smarter operations, one step at a time. It’s about what it really takes to get from duct-taped workflows to something that resembles the vision the term “smart buildings” was attempting to invoke: integrated, collaborative, cloud-native, AI-ready operations.
When we look across all the interviews we’ve done and case studies we’ve published, we see a shared pattern emerging—a kind of roadmap that more and more organizations are following, whether they realize it or not.
It starts with small wins and builds toward a future where systems talk to each other, teams work from the same data, and automation handles the stuff that used to eat up hours of staff time.
This is our first crack at synthesizing and naming that roadmap.
Every smart building journey begins with a reality check on the status quo. Stage 0 is where many organizations find themselves today—a world of manual workflows, isolated systems, and technology that isn’t pulling its weight. Key characteristics of this stage include:
In this stage, day-to-day firefighting dominates. The thought of overhauling building operations can feel overwhelming to an understaffed facilities team. People stick to familiar habits (“it’s always been done this way”) not because they don’t see inefficiencies, but because they lack the bandwidth and support to change.
The challenge—and the opportunity—is to find a starting point that breaks the cycle, and then keep that momentum going.
Stage 1 begins when a team wrangles one of those silos. Rather than trying to “boil the ocean,” it starts small by digitizing a single system in a way that adds real value. The key is choosing a system that is both operationally important and relatively self-contained, making it a good candidate for a pilot project.
A prime example is domestic hot water (DHW) in hotels. As Brandon Matthies of Nexa (which helps digitize such systems) explained, not all buildings even have a central building automation system (BAS) today, especially in hospitality or smaller facilities. Yet they still have critical needs.
“In a hotel… you need a hot shower and you need a bed… that’s all that matters,” Matthies noted, underscoring why hot water systems were their first target for digitization. By outfitting a hotel’s DHW loops with sensors and cloud-connected controls, the facilities team gains real-time visibility and alerts for issues like temperature and pressure drops—a huge improvement over waiting for guests to report a problem.
The Stage 1 mindset is to learn to walk before you run. Pick one high-value system and connect it. Demonstrate tangible ROI (e.g. fewer complaints, lower energy use, avoided downtime) on a small scale. This builds trust in the technology and enthusiasm for expanding it.
As Metron’s Ellie Graeden explained, the moment a device (like a water meter in Metron’s case) is digitized and brought to the cloud, a vendor can begin applying domain-specific AI to that data—recognizing “what normal looks like” for that system or site and flagging anomalies without human review.
At Stage 1, the organization starts to tweak its workflows around those signals: staff begin checking a digital dashboard each morning instead of running around with a clipboard, and responding to automated alerts instead of discovering issues days later. In Matthies’ experience, the first step is often changing where the team gets its information—moving from reactive, local checks to a cloud-based source of truth.
That cultural shift, even for one system, lays the groundwork for bigger changes ahead.
After proving out a connected solution in one or a few pilot locations, the next step is scaling that solution across the portfolio. Stage 2 is about taking the initial success—whether it’s smart hot water management, fault detection & diagnostics for HVAC, or something else—and rolling it out as a new standard practice in all relevant buildings.
This moves the organization from an isolated experiment to enterprise-level adoption of a connected workflow.
The hotel operator that digitized hot water in a handful of properties, for instance, decided to deploy the Nexa solution across their entire portfolio. “We are in the process of installing 20 sites now and have budgeted the expansion of the rest of the portfolio which is over three times that by the end of the year,” Matthies said. With all their hotels on the same platform, the corporate engineering team can monitor water usage and performance portfolio-wide, and every site is benefiting from the lessons learned during the pilot.
British Land, a major office landlord in the UK, provides another Stage 2 example. They began by implementing Facilio’s fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) tool for HVAC in a subset of buildings, aiming to cut energy waste and catch equipment issues early.
Once the approach was validated, they expanded it. Now every office property in their portfolio uses the same FDD and meter analytics software, with a common set of energy performance dashboards and reports. This standardization created a baseline for what “good” operation looks like across all sites.
Water metering offers another clear example. As Metron’s Graeden put it, “if you are looking across your portfolio… you can actually use those data (to identify) a high performer or a low performer, and if they’ve had recent issues, alerts, leaks and so forth.” The same anomaly signal that helps a single facility manager optimize day-to-day workflows becomes a portfolio-wide KPI, enabling managers to compare sites and rank performance without diving into the domain’s technical details.
By focusing on one clear problem (in British Land’s case, HVAC energy efficiency) and solving it across the portfolio, they created a template for tackling the next problem. Each successful rollout trains the organization—users get comfortable with new tools, executives see metrics trending in the right direction, and skepticism gives way to curiosity about what else could be improved.
By the end of Stage 2, one or two systems are now cloud-managed and operated in a data-driven way everywhere. The organization has proven to itself that operational tech can work and deliver value.
Still, many other systems (and other departments) remain in their old silos…
In Stage 3, the scope of Connected Operations widens. It’s no longer about just one system, but multiple building systems integrated on a common platform, at least within a single department’s purview. The prototypical scenario is a facilities management team unifying its various tools into one cohesive operations center.
Continuing the earlier example, the hotel portfolio isn’t planning to stop at hot water in their partnership with Nexa. After that first phase, they began layering on additional use cases—adding cooling tower performance, leak detection sensors, and even water usage visibility to the same cloud platform. Now the engineering team can use one interface to oversee domestic water, cooling, leaks, and water usage.
In other cases, the driver for Stage 3 is simplifying a messy tech stack. Saruf Alam of KODE Labs describes clients who just want their daily workflow to be easier. “They have operators who can’t jump from building to building, because everything looks different… Their ask is so simple: ‘Can you just bring all of this into one place? Give me consistent graphics, give me a consistent interface,’” Alam says.
It’s a push for consistency and efficiency—“a pure productivity play”. By using a cloud platform to abstract away the differences between, say, ten different building automation systems, these organizations make life much easier for their staff. A chief engineer no longer needs to remember five logins or train junior techs on multiple UIs; everything from HVAC to lighting looks and works similarly across the portfolio.
Leading real estate operators like QuadReal have embraced this approach. Alam notes that QuadReal “standardized on a set of five to six reports and KPIs” for all their buildings, so that every operator is looking at the same problems in the same way and knows the same exact steps to improve them.” That consistency is powerful: it means best practices can be replicated everywhere, and performance can be benchmarked uniformly.
British Land, meanwhile, isn’t stopping at Stage 2 either. As their maturity increased, they began layering on occupancy data onto Facilio’s platform to fine-tune their co-working operations, where booking data could be connected to real-time occupancy trends to adjust temperature setpoints, optimize ventilation, or even open or close zones of a building. They also integrated lighting control systems, allowing for demand-based lighting schedules that drove additional energy savings on top of the HVAC gains.
These incremental expansions show how once the data layer infrastructure is in place, new use cases can be added with less friction, enabling the organization to manage multiple systems from a shared platform and deepen the ROI from earlier investments.
By Stage 3, an organization has effectively created a Connected Operations hub for a single department. With this solid, standardized operational backbone in place, the stage is set to extend the benefits to other parts of the organization.
[Members can log in to read more about stage 4, Empire State Realty Trust's journey past stage 3, and get the checklist for moving from stage to stage!]
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This is a great piece!
I agree.