As smart buildings become increasingly prevalent, a greater number of building and business systems require connection into the smart building ecosystem. This interconnectedness necessitates a higher degree of integration and validation, emphasising the importance of standardised communication protocols, naming schemes, and data structures.
Understanding and addressing the common mistakes that can arise throughout the project lifecycle is crucial to ensuring the successful design and delivery of smart building projects. Four members of the Digital Buildings Council (DBC) Steering Committee, drawing on diverse stakeholder perspectives, have identified six recurring pain points impacting the viability of these projects. These insights, gleaned from real-world experiences, form part of the DBC’s Lessons Learned series and provide a roadmap for navigating the complexities of smart building implementation. The Lessons Learned series forms part of the DBC members’ commitment to collaborating on its mission to enhance best practice, including initial aims to improve professional understanding through knowledge share.
1. Project planning & design issues
Late Integration Decisions: The decision to incorporate smart features often occurs too late in the design process, leading to integration issues.
Unclear Specifications: Ambiguity in project requirements for smart systems causes confusion and misalignment.
Use-Case Driven Approach: Projects often focus on specific uses rather than overall objectives, limiting scalability and long-term value.
Technology-First Mindset: Prioritising specific technologies over user needs can result in unsuitable solutions.
Naming Convention Inconsistencies: Lack of standardised naming conventions leads to confusion, especially for tenant fit-outs and future connectivity.
To mitigate these challenges, it is key to establish a collaborative and proactive approach from the earliest design phases. Ensuring input from building owners and tenants as part of a dedicated smart building task force throughout the project lifecycle would help ensure that user needs, rather than specific technologies, drive decision-making. By focusing on clear, standardised design specifications and measurable success criteria, projects can avoid late-stage compromises. Adopting consistent naming conventions early also streamlines coordination and future-proofing efforts, enabling seamless integration and scalability across all stages of the project lifecycle.
2. Stakeholder engagement & collaboration
Late MSI Engagement: Master System Integrators (MSIs) are often brought in too late to influence design and integration effectively.
Insufficient Stakeholder Involvement: Key stakeholders, particularly end-users and tenants, are not adequately involved, resulting in systems that fail to meet their needs.
Poor Communication: Communication breakdown between clients, contractors, MSI, etc., hinders project success.
Lack of Collaboration: Siloed working and poor collaboration, especially during pre-construction, commissioning, and handover, create integration challenges and delays.
The industry requires a fundamental shift toward a more collaborative and transparent approach to address these outlined challenges in smart building projects. This shift begins with establishing clearly defined roles and responsibilities for all stakeholders, ensuring that each party understands their contribution and accountability throughout the project lifecycle. Early engagement of an MSI is paramount, allowing them to contribute their expertise from the initial design and planning stages, which is crucial for ensuring seamless system integration and preventing costly rework later on. Proactive and open communication channels are vital to facilitate this effective collaboration.
3. Technical expertise & understanding
Subcontractor/Integrator Knowledge Gaps: Subcontractors and system integrators often lack the technical understanding to implement smart building technologies effectively.
Unclear Roles and Responsibilities: Ambiguity around the scope of work for MSIs, MSCs, and smart building contractors, coupled with varying skill levels amongst MSIs, leads to project gaps.
Data Validation Overlooked: Requirements for data validation and its importance are often unclear or neglected.
Limited Workplace Technology Understanding: A lack of understanding of the broader workplace technology ecosystem and its data capabilities hinders effective integration.
Severe Skill Shortages: While a basic understanding of engineering principles exists, there is a reluctance or fear to embrace smart technology implementation fully.
Technology-Led Projects: Overemphasis on software solutions without considering the broader integrated systems.
Lack of (or Misinterpretation of) "Smart" Standards: The absence of clear and widely accepted standards for smart building design and implementation, alongside potential limitations from rigid standards hindering innovation, presents a challenge.
To help overcome these challenges, it is critical to once again invest in early engagement with skilled smart building consultants and system integrators who possess a deep understanding of both workplace technology ecosystems and integration requirements. MSIs can assist by providing targeted training programs for subcontractors and integrators to help bridge knowledge gaps and build confidence in implementing more advanced systems. Standardising communication protocols, naming conventions, and data structures from the outset ensures smoother integration, reduces the risk of overlooked data validation, and minimises rework. Effectively moving towards automation rather than manual software work – and the more automation that is used in a project will, in turn, help to deskill some of these complex tasks, allowing it to become more widely understood.
4. Budget & resource constraints
As a direct result of the previous headings, cost consultants and programme managers are finding it increasingly difficult to budget and cost plan for smart building initiatives. As procurement strategies and roles and responsibilities become better defined, accurate budgeting can be included at project initiation.
Limited ROI Examples: Limited public examples of real-world value delivered by smart buildings, particularly around user experience, make it difficult to justify investment.
Budget Inaccuracies: Inaccurate cost plans often necessitate value engineering, potentially compromising functionality.
Insufficient Smart Enablement Budget: Limited budget allocation for smart systems across contractors restricts integration scope and effectiveness.
Evolving Technology and Standards: Rapid advancements and a lack of standardised frameworks make it challenging to anticipate costs and plan future-proof solutions, creating budget uncertainties.
To avoid these pitfalls, it is crucial to establish clear procurement strategies and involve smart building specialists or MSIs early in the project to align objectives and accurately forecast costs. The industry would benefit greatly from the development of a comprehensive database of real-world ROI case studies to better demonstrate value. Additionally, incorporating flexible budget contingencies can help ensure adaptability to evolving technologies. A further opportunity lies in improving communication and education for cost consultants on smart building technologies and their implementation, alongside providing clear definitions of the roles and responsibilities of different MSI types. This ensures more accurate comparisons and informed decision-making.
5. Commissioning & handover challenges
Condensed Commissioning Period: Inflexible project end-dates result in rushed commissioning, potentially compromising thoroughness.
BMS Commissioning Delays: Delays in BMS commissioning leave insufficient time for MSI involvement.
Poor Handover: Smart building systems are often deprioritised during handover to facilities teams, leading to operational and maintenance issues.
Smart building commissioning requires a meticulous approach to guarantee that both the physical and digital aspects are functioning correctly. Independent experts should be present to confirm the proper installation of equipment and adherence to safety standards. A comprehensive network scan is essential to identify all data points and ensure they align with the project requirements. Given the large amount of data involved in smart building systems, examining it at the data lake stage during construction allows for the efficient detection and resolution of discrepancies. The MSI can use this data to generate automated reports, which can be used to address any issues promptly.
Existing handover frameworks, like the BSRIA Soft Landings Framework, need adjustments to specifically include smart building operations. A "digital soft landing," incorporating BSRIA's six-phase approach, ensures a smooth transition from construction to operation. A structured handover framework is essential for all smart building projects.
6. Ownership & responsibility
Unclear Smart Building Ownership: Lack of clarity regarding ownership of the smart building and its data makes stakeholders hesitant to take responsibility.
Conflicting Stakeholder Agendas: Differing stakeholder priorities lead to potential conflicts and misaligned goals.
A clear definition of data ownership and responsibility, particularly regarding updates and maintenance, is necessary to mitigate these obstacles. Addressing the diverse interpretations of "smart buildings" and ensuring alignment amongst stakeholders is crucial for effectively managing and utilising these systems.
Conclusion and call to action
We believe that the success of smart and digital building projects comes down to tackling the key challenges head-on, starting from planning and design right through to commissioning and handover. Engaging all stakeholders — clients, end-users, contractors, and facility managers — early and keeping them involved throughout the project is essential to getting everyone on the same page with clear roles and responsibilities.
We also think there’s a real need for standardising processes, communication protocols, and naming conventions at the outset. This makes integration smoother, helps future-proof smart systems, and avoids headaches later on. Just as importantly, there’s a huge opportunity to upskill clients, owners, cost consultants, contractors, subcontractors, and integrators. By improving industry-wide education and collaboration, we can bridge knowledge gaps and boost confidence in using and implementing the latest smart technologies.
The group also feels strongly that flexible standards are the way forward—ones that evolve alongside advancing technology, rather than holding things back. Focusing on measurable success criteria, rather than just chasing the latest gadgets, will ensure that smart buildings deliver long-term value.
Embedding proper commissioning processes and leveraging digital tools for data validation is critical to getting projects right the first time. Bringing in frameworks like BSRIA Soft Landings can help smooth the transition to operations, making sure facilities teams are ready to take the reins and actually use the systems effectively.
In our view, it’s about more than just installing technology—it’s about creating smart buildings that genuinely deliver value, enhance user experiences, and set a new standard for what the built environment can achieve. There’s a lot of work to do, but by tackling these issues together, we can unlock the full potential of smart buildings.
We call for broader industry discussion and feedback on the identified challenges, and we plan to launch a survey to gather input on the frequency of encountered problems and participant roles within the industry. We would be quite interested in hosting a roundtable discussion in the future to explore these issues further.
Participants included:
Daniel Watson, Hereworks
Sam Norledge, LMG
John Clarke, Onesight Solutions
James Thomas, SES Engineering Services
For more information, visit the DBC site: https://thedbc.io/