This diagram of the smart building tech stack is by Rob Huntington at emeseye (prounounced MSI, i.e. Master Systems Integrator). That gives an idea of where Rob is coming from. It is akin to the one from James Dice and his Nexus Labs community I shared earlier (see here), but is slightly more vertical and includes cybersecurity is another layer/important consideration. It also helps better explain what is going on in the data layer and what’s needed given all the different protocals being used – particularly by all the Operational Technology at the Connected Device Layer.

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Back in the mid-aughts, I hosted a podcast series as a follow-up to the Connecting Marketing book I co-wrote with Dr Paul Marsden. One of the themes I explored was ‘brand storytelling’ and that included speaking to Annette Simmons, author of Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins, The Story Factor and growing list of other titles along similar lines (listen to Episode 1 and Episode 2).

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Not everything I post about on here is directly related to smart buildings. I have highlighted Gennaro Cuofano‘s 4 Week MBA site because I haven’t seen any similar Freemium resource guide/course in the smart building space. Nor his kind of ‘In a Nutshell’ explanations of key concepts, e.g. the Cloud as a Service (CaaS) Business Model In A Nutshell one highlighted in this post.

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Back in 2021 John Gleeson and Jonathan Treece (now at Barclays) from Arcadis presented their How Smart is Smart: a point in time session at the Smart Buildings Show that looked at how the increasing number of physical and digital accredition schemes for buildings were overwhelming investors with a logo war. That’s still arguably the case, but it was interesting to see how they bucketed those rating schemes into 3 categories:

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Before the pandemic I co-wrote a book with ex-Google brand planner turned academic Lazar Dzamic on Strategic Content Marketing. It followed on from a series of e-publications and events I curated supported by The Drum magazine and the leading trade and award bodies in advertising and marketing. The series looked at latest thinking and best practice in ‘branded content marketing’, running from 2013-17 and reaching an annual audience 450,000+. You can see some of the editions on Slideshare:

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I didn’t go to many of the conference sessions at the Smart Buildings Show this year because I was mostly there for the networking. But one of the few I did attend was the No Regrets – How Smart Buildings Are Valuable in Uncertain Times one by Matthew Marson from JLL Technologies. Matthew had kindly participated in the retrofit-themed panel I’d moderated the previous day, so I had some idea about what he’d be covering.

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For a large part of this year I have been speaking to stakeholders across the smart building ecosystem about retrofitting. That has included facilitating round tables that I have been writing about for Smart Buildings Magazine (see here and here), as well as curating panels including the Why is Retrofit Not Taken More Seriously in the Climate Change Conversation? on at the recent Smart Buildings Show.

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James Dice has done great job of promoting the Independent Data Layer concept and what it is for and why through the Smart Building Tech Stack diagrams being shared on the Nexus Labs community platform he founded and runs. The one above is from part 3 of series of posts on Horizontal Architecture (see more here), which also mentions the Building Operating System concept created by the digital buildings team at Google and The Smarter Stack created by the Monday Live crew. All of these could be possible ways of slicing and dicing the Smart Building Technology Landscape (possible as a way of organising the layout of an exhibition like the Smart Buildings Show or the recent Smart Building Show Case at PropTech Connect. However, I am not sure they are quite what I am looking for as far as the infographic I have in mind is concerned (see more here).

The author and designer Manuel Lima has been discussing what it means to think in systems on LinkedIn, as well as how and why design thinking should become synonymous with network thinking. This has formed part of his promotion of his new book The New Designer: Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change (The MIT Press: 2023).

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My series on posts on LinkedIn about the shortcomings of the RIBA Plan of Works Smart Building Overlay have generated the most engagement of any I have written there, including this one from earlier this year that clocked up around 30,000 views. Part of that is confusion about who was invited to participate at the onset and why, and not least because of transparency.

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