As mentioned on LinkedIn, last year I facilitated a round table with mostly Developer/Owner/Operator participants that I wrote-up for Smart Buildings Mag (see here). That discussion and surrounding outreach shaped not only the 5 other gatherings I subsequently curated, but also much of what I wrote about on LinkedIn.

To kick things off this year, I am facilitating a Round Table on Smart Enablement kindly hosted by the folks at LMG (lmgiq.com) on Tuesday 6th February. In this post, I try and explain a little about Who, What, How and Why.

What I have tried to do with this Round Table is bring together those at the forefront of design and deployment with a mix of participants including a newer breed of design consultants, master systems integrators, technology/platform vendors and also co-founder of the Smart Building Collective | Certification who accredit (smart) people, places and platforms. WiredScore’s former head of research for SmartScore Aleksandra Dasala is also helping me with the facilitation and has already been a great help in rethinking the format.

The backdrop to this gathering is that every year my feed is full of predictions from all and sundry across every industry. And, so, I just thought it might be more interesting to see if a group of stakeholders might have some consensus about what’s on the horizon, as well as what they see as the key challenges and themes for this year.

Diversity is likely to be one but I am trying to ensure that across my various activities including an accompanying pilot series of the Forever Forward podcast series hosted by Umesh Bhutoria at Xempla – Decision Support System for Enterprise Asset Management (more on this soon).

I plan to be co-writing up the discussion with Aleks for Smart Building Magazine along the same lines as the ones I put together last year (see here), as well as sharing extracts on LinkedIn here. The plan being that the podcast and round table discussions will feed into my curation of other gatherings this year and also what I write about on LinkedIn and elsewhere (hopefully on collaboration with participants and others).

Hopefully, that explains some of the Why, but the Who for the Round Table includes the following:

• Mike Hook, Owner & Director at LMG
• Nicholas White, Co-founder/Managing Partner at Smart Building Collective
• Daniel Watson, UK Director at Hereworks
• Katie Whipp, Head of Partnerships at REsustain
• Matthew O’Halloran, Director, Head of Revenue at Smart Spaces
• John Clarke , Operations Director at One sight solutions
• Brian Coogan, Director of Digital Services at Ethos Engineering
• James Thomas, Head of Smart Buildings & Technologies at SES Engineering
• Kevin Brownell, Director at Nuxform
• Brahm Lategan, Smart Buildings Associate Consultant at Mix Consultancy
• Ravi Lakhani, Head of Smart Solutions at Cordless Consultants
• Derek Harnett, Chief Operations Officer at Switch Automation
• Rob Souto, Specification Engineer at Simmtronic
• Shaun Taylor, End User Business Manager at HID

In terms What and How, I am trying to get consensus from participants on 8 themes to discuss over 2 and half hours. That’s starts by asking then to submit 6 discussion points each that I then paraphase on PostIt notes:

I then card sort these into themes and ask a neutral third-party to sensecheck i.e., Aleks:

Potentially there maybe also be a need to get participants to vote on the 8 themes but, hopefully, the top 8 will emerge from the process. I do plan to record the gathering so hopefully some of the proceedings will be shared.

Really looking forward to this discussion and accompanying pilot podcast series.