A new report from Memoori examines the challenges and potential strategies for commercial real estate owners & operators as they seek to maximize and ‘future proof’ their smart building technology investments.

The future is open standards. Adoption of an open data management and systems procurement strategy will help ensure a much greater degree of flexibility for the future integration of new systems and applications into the smart building, as well as helping reduce costs, implementation time and overall complexity of communication architectures.

The most cost effective and efficient means of smart solutions delivery for developers working on new build projects will involve embedding the technology delivery plan into the building design at an early stage, before what has previously been the norm. Any lack of effective data, information and responsibility transfer at the practical completion of a new building can have serious adverse effects on operational effectiveness.

Engagement with smart building consultants, master systems integrators and cybersecurity consultants as part of the systems planning and design phase can help ensure that the overall systems design is coherent, based on open standards that support interoperability and maintains a high level of cybersecurity.

Collaborating with the right partners will help to deliver specifications to vendors that provide clearly defined data outputs, processing and analytics requirements (including consideration of APIs), data formats (including metadata) and reporting requirements.