Managing Technology Redundancy in IoT and Smart Buildings

What Is It?

Technology redundancy is when a piece of technology is no longer needed to provide a function because it is either outdated or something else has replaced it.

Why Is This Important?

Most solutions we see installed solve short-term problems. The long-term is often an afterthought. Because of COVID-19 and return to work, we are seeing a lot of single feature apps being installed into smart workplace or smart buildings. And the problem with that is that they're siloed.

So rather than breaking down silos and having a better uniform experience, it's only performing one function. And it might not be able to talk to anything else. And this isn't new. It's just this is how a lot of people respond to problems rapidly.

Systems are always evolving. So no matter what technology you implement, 5-10 years down the track, there's always going to be a point where you have to replace something. The problem lies in how the technology is connected to the broader ecosystem. If you don't have an abstraction layer or an integration platform in the middle, then you can quickly get into a position where you're having to replace not only one solution, but a lot of other solutions as well. Whereas, if you're using an integration platform, then we can change things at either level of the architecture because each component is modular.

For example, desk booking. If the logic is coupled to the interface itself, then you can’t leverage the location awareness for another future requirement.

What happens if the need for desk booking becomes a thing of the past?

The tracking data used to manage desk occupancy cannot be leveraged for other workflows. This data could be triggering automatic events as you navigate the building, for general user experiences, or it could just be for analytics.

What Can Be Done?

I think it's important to decouple the smarts from the interfaces, because the interfaces need to change over time. That's the thing that should change as your culture changes, as external factors change. Eventually may not care about where people sit. So when you’re looking for technology to solve something, it’s important to check whether or not that data can be leveraged for other use cases.

Your business problems are always going to be changing and evolving. You have to think of technology in the same way. Your technology has to be set up in a way that can continue to change and evolve in line with your business challenges. Basically, can that technology be integrated with? If not, it might solve in the short-term but that’s as far as it will go.