This presentation by Gary Bark from ‘Converged Building Solutions Ltd’.

What is an ‘Intelligent Building’ – a building is only intelligent when it plays an active part in meeting the objectives set for it – but very few buildings have objectives set for them over and above form, plus basic environmental and accommodation functions – so this results in a lack of intelligent buildings.

So – what might be the objectives for a building:

Manage itself as part of a wide area estate
Contribute to the occupant experience
Contribute to the visitor experience
Contribute to corporate responsibility policy
Contribute to the corporate brand
Contribute a revenue stream

… starting to doubt that any of this is meaningful – either something that is going over my head, or just a load of rubbish!

Just had a concrete example – if you have access control on buildings you can (for example) see if a student is using the library, and if they are, take some action. The problem with this is that it is pretty simplistic – many of our library resources can be used online, so physical presence is really not relevant. Also, the question isn’t if someone is using the library, but how they are performing academically – and so we need to measure performance not library visits.

So – first sensible thing in this talk – that the way Estates and IT work together is key, and this is a challenge in many (all?) institutions.

To a large extent the basic message seems to be that you need clear objectives when building, and joined up thinking between Estates and IT in terms of delivering. This seems pretty non-contraversial – but the latter seems easy to say, and harder to acheive.

I’m afraid I lost interest at this point – seemed to go on for ages, and just didn’t grab my interest (sorry)