It’s hard to argue with the advice in this whitepaper now available on the OSIsoft learning portal.  Author David Doll lays out all the ways good intentions about energy efficiency initiatives can go wrong:

1. Sin of Wrong Accounting: Capital budget financing for needed energy efficiency measures
2. Sin of Fits-and-Starts: Once-and-done commissioning
3. Sin of Flying Blind: Making decisions without tapping into your own data
4. Sin of Caveat Emptor: Ripping and replacing equipment without first analyzing your building’s data
5. Sin of Narrow Scope: Limiting your vision to only BAS-connected equipment
6. Sin of Stealth Mode: Attempting energy management without involving all stakeholders
7. Sin of Short-Term Thinking: Deploying solutions without future-proofing

The paper is a high-level read, and the icons are clever. But don’t be fooled by the design simplicity, the messages bear repeating.  Consider this quote from an article touting an IT vs Facilities Turf War  in Fortune Magazine — a clear #6, Sin of Stealth Mode:

“Facilities managers are going to bring a lot of this stuff in largely without the CIO and IT managers involved,” said Tom Pincince, president and CEO of Digital Lumens. “Remember BYOD? Now we’re going to have BYOB, or bring your own building, and the IT managers are going to have to deal with it. Right now there is a divide. The facilities guys look at IT as technocrats and the CIOs don’t want to deal with the physicality of the building automation.”

The Fortune editor, Stacy Higgenbothom, dials down the blithe attitude toward such stealthiness in the rest of this article and in her post about security and the internet of things of the previous day.

OSIsoft is in a strong position to straddle any gap between Facilities Management and IT, providing common ground to the two types of stakeholder. Its flagship PI System can collect, store, analyze and share millions of source streams, so it has the scalability to pull in data from connected IoT-type sensor systems. The company has a globally recognized name in enterprise data infrastructure and real-time operational intelligence. It has decades of experience in the gritty work of collecting and compressing operational data for trending and archiving purposes, as well as in analytics techniques and delivering actionable data-driven insights. Enterprise customers have been engaging with the PI System to answer questions about process, quality, energy, regulatory compliance, safety, security, and asset health improvements across their operations. Certain of these customers have started pointing the PI System toward their facilities and energy management challenges, and a selection of these presented at the OSIsoft 2015 User Conference last month. Genetech, UC Davis, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Hershey Company, as well as Data Center Infrastructure Management software partner Claridion and San Leandro High School students were among them. The presentations were recorded and are available on the OSIsoft learning portal. I also sat in on these presentation and will provide you with my synopses in future posts soon.