The Mission of Buildings

Shannon Smith is the CEO of PointGuard and he delivers a talk on building management that outlines what the role of a building is, what obstacles are in the way of a building achieving its mission and how building teams can overcome said difficulties.

Smith argues that if buildings were to complete their mission, they would bring about a certain utopia to both the people that are managing the facility and the individuals working and living in it. The keynote goes to briefly explore how older technologies fail to elevate structures to fulfill their mission and how the focus in the context of management is skewed in one particular direction. The primary example the speaker uses to illustrate this is the obsession with energy analytics. Yet, the argument is that we don't build to save energy but to bring about enjoyment and comfort of space.

The talk on building management outlines six main obstacles that keep buildings from completing their mission. This includes "the tyranny of the urgent today," talent gaps, lack of stability and comfort, the misuse of knowledge, and the uncertainty of action. For Smith, this can be addressed through the processing of BMS data through computer software. Operating data is identified as the "single most important piece of information missing from building management." Here, the speaker advertises PointGuard — a cloud-based platform that helps building teams amplify comfort and achieve lower operational costs. The software is designed around specific goals that are to maximize efficiency.

Smith's talk on building management goes on to highlight that one needs to be cognizant of time restraints. The platform "has to be intuitive, straightforward, easy-to-use and [it] has to solve the talent gap." Other focus areas of using software like PointGuard includes the amplification of "local knowledge," as well as the elimination of "comfort mistakes."