Building Facility Manager : web community ?

An energy management web community for commercial building facility manager s : myth or reality?

Social networks are booming whether they are personal, such as Facebook or Myspace, or professional such as Linked-in or Viadeo. This momentum demonstrates deep changes in our behaviour and shows the need for people to communicate and share their experience, through new tools and technologies.

My vision is that we could gather building facility manager s within dedicated web communities for sharing experience and getting tangible benefits from interacting with peers …

So, let’s imagine that many commercial buildings have implemented an energy management system which allows the building facility manager to monitor all of his water and energies consumption: electricity, gas, heat, etc..

Those building are fitted with main meters but also sub-meters to get a deeper dive into how the energy spendings are split by usage or cost centre.

Thanks to the dashboard and reports the building facility manager gets from the system, he can analyze the energy usage, identify savings, monitor investments return on investment and also prepare all the energy reports, be it for cost management or for sustainability programs.

In addition, this simple energy management solution also enables him basic control functions, occupancy control and load shedding to name the key ones.

Let’s also imagine that above system has been developed with new technologies, for example web 2.0 technologies, allowing device auto-discovery, easy energy dashboards addition or modifications, etc. In a nutshell that solution would allow for interactivity and evolution, at the facility manager fingertips, without requesting time consuming and costly system configuration efforts.

Would that work alone?

My dream is that we could gather building facility manager s within web communities for sharing experience and getting tangible benefits from interacting with peers.

I have listed here 5 major benefits that I strongly feel will bring value to all Building Facility Manager s participating to the community:

1. Share energy savings good practices
2. Get tips on how to best use the system and solve issues
3. Download dashboards and widgets, from the library the community would have built (think of Wikipedia open source projects, …)
4. Share information on energy regulation and standards
5. Create as a community an energy usage database and benchmark your own building

Is this vision already a reality in your environment?  Why not sharing it with us then?

If not, do you agree with my point that it would help the building facility manager to face their growing energy challenges?

Or would you find that type of community too intrusive for you and your company?

Laurent Bloch