By Jeff Carpenter 

The demand for technology solutions in buildings continues to increase, partially because of the ever-expanding role of technology in our personnel lives. We mature with technology as individuals and then we demand it as consumers and as employees. This means that if building owners who operate a business don’t keep up with transformative building technology, they find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. 

Building costs, of course, are not declining and the increased demand for the latest technology only increases the cost pressures for owners. The typical result is that some of the aspirational technology becomes unaffordable on a project and is left on the value-engineering chopping block. 

For owners to be able to afford transformative technology in their new buildings, they must ring every economy of scale out of the building systems they are procuring. As just one example, projects often have four or five contractors installing the exact same CAT6 cabling for multiple systems. There are measurable cost savings lost in this duplication of effort. 

The first step toward affording transformational technologies in new buildings is to unify the technology design and engineering process. The goal of this unified approach is to have a single point of responsibility for all building systems to gain the consolidation necessary to achieve measurable economies of scale. The savings achieved will then allow new building technologies to be affordable.