As energy costs continue to increase in this challenging economic environment, so does the responsibility of building owners and managers to address energy efficiency within their organizations. At the same time, companies face growing external pressures to set high environmental and social-performance standards.

Three responsibilities — fiscal, environmental and social — often make up what is called the “triple bottom line” of sustainability. While many organizations struggle to define what this “sustainability mandate” means to them, the journey often begins with coordinated, energy-efficient facility strategies.

Fortunately, in recent years, the technology, standards, and expertise required to maximize facility efficiency have matured. Previously distinct systems within buildings are converging on standard platforms, applications, and infrastructures. The resulting synergy translates into lower construction costs and increased operational and energy efficiency.

This is a rare, compelling set of circumstances. Advances in technology, standardization, and expertise are combining to unleash new opportunities that can help facility and information-technology (IT) managers improve building and business performance.

A HISTORY OF DISCONNECTION

The mandate of energy efficiency is now mainstream. Yet the successful implementation of energy-efficiency strategies hinges on the removal of long-standing barriers between facility and IT groups, which is not easy.

The facility-management and IT disciplines have evolved in silos. The skills of facility managers and technical staff are an accumulation of lessons learned and the limited set of solutions that have been available to them. IT managers grew up with technology, routinely are trained on new developments, and have established methods of documenting and implementing technology best practices.

Facility and IT managers traditionally have installed and managed separate networks for building and business systems, with each measuring success against a distinct set of criteria. While there has been a convergence of those systems over a common IT-network infrastructure in recent years, the promise of efficiency has not been fully realized, as confusion and skepticism remain.

Facility managers might ask: “Will I have to abdicate responsibility for the reliability and quality of my systems to an organization that has other priorities? Can I depend on IT for critical applications, such as fire alarms? Will all the special IT rules constrain how I remotely access my system? Can I train members of my staff on all of the new things they need to understand?”

IT managers might ask, “Is the building-automation-system (BAS) application consistent with the IT networks, including firewalls and virtual private networks? Does it comply with our policies for user authentication and authorization? Does it introduce vulnerabilities?”

Both facility and IT managers might question their roles in an integrated environment. Who manages the procurement process? Who holds ultimate responsibility for the network? Who controls head count when efficiencies are gained?

COMBINATION OF CIRCUMSTANCES

The tide is turning. By desire or necessity, facility and IT managers are partnering more closely to approach building and business improvements holistically. At the core of that partnership is the acceptance of Internet-protocol- (IP-) based control as the foundation of an integrated BAS/IT environment.

In 2009, global sales of IP-based integrated building-control systems will outweigh those of non-IP-based systems.¹

THE STANDARDIZATION OF TECHNOLOGY

Over the past decade, technology standardization has evolved in two phases: first, within the BAS industry and, more recently, as IT protocols have been applied.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, most BAS vendors reinvented their systems to use standard protocols developed for the controls industry, such as BACnet and LonWorks. This allowed multiple-vendor HVAC, lighting, electrical-distribution, and life-safety building-control systems to be integrated into a common system architecture.

While total interoperability of the systems was not always ensured, their direction and promise were well-established. Owners could install building networks and field-bus solutions that would support standards-based expansion. But it did not always enable an IT application to read real-time or historical control-system values.

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