The GRESB Data Quality Standard is paving the path to digital facilities management for the CRE industry. After launching more than 10 years ago with the goal of providing quality Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) data about real estate investments to the capital markets, GRESB is now focused on leveraging technology to elevate the quality of non-financial real estate data.
As the newly minted VP of Operations at Switch Automation, I had
the pleasure of visiting New York City to join GRESB’s Data Quality Technical Working Group. Switch is a Premier GRESB
Partner, which means that our Engineering and Leadership teams are working with
GRESB’s technical committee to establish a data quality standard for the
industry.
Evolving an industry
GRESB is drawing on data quality best practices across industries to apply a new standard to how GRESB reports ESG data. This new standard seeks to reduce reporting and validation costs, while improving the reliability and effectiveness of industry data collection systems. The goals of the GRESB Data Quality Standard are to improve transparency and engagement for investors and to provide valuable insight into the efficacy of participants’ sustainability programs.
The GRESB Data Quality Technical Working Group, a cohort, of 30+ industry experts and GRESB partners with varied subject matter expertise, is an integral part of the Standard’s evolution process. With oversight from the GRESB benchmark Committees and Advisory boards, this team will define data quality rules and inform the content, structure and evolution of the Data Quality Standard. No easy task, given the many challenges real estate teams face when operating large portfolios.
Consistency is key
The Standard will need to
consider several factors. Every building is unique and equipment is often
proprietary, varying by site. Multiple contractors spanning many disciplines
add to a building’s intricate operations. A variety of architectures including
cloud, on premise and vendor-hosted, often silo data into sometimes unreachable
places. Diverse communications and protocols, like BACnet, Lon and Modbus mean
different languages for data interpreters.
Inconsistent naming and tagging
standards add further complexity to the pool of raw data. If all that weren’t
enough to tackle, there’s the onslaught of cybersecurity threats and plethora
of IoT sensors and platforms designed to gather building intelligence. Our industry is rapidly
evolving
and the traditional facilities workforce isn’t equipped with the IT expertise
needed to ensure data quality and actualize its valuable insights in this
digital world. How can we advance while optimizing our assets for the highest
performance?
Activating digital facilities
management
Digital facilities management
is the way of the future, but the journey requires thoughtful investment of
time, money and human capital. To better leverage our precious human resources,
we’ll need to shift away from spreadsheets and data wrangling, instead leaning
in to technological solutions. By automating tedious manual data capture and
using existing standards like Brick and Haystack to translate our mountains of
information, we can make more timely, cost-effective decisions about how to
manage our buildings.
Does this mean humans are out?
Quite the contrary. By embracing technology to turn challenges into
opportunities, we’re reimagining our industry while creating desirable careers
for today’s emerging workforce.
As we begin the journey from
manual data aggregation, analysis and reporting toward tech-enabled data
platforms and processes, what should we look for? Listening to some of the
experts in the room this week, an ideal solution should:
Scale to accommodate portfolio
changes and technology advancements
Provide a variety of data ingestion
methods, i.e. SFTP, CSV, API
Go beyond energy efficiency to
drive timely, informed business decisions
Enable
collaboration between end users, site technicians and 3rd party vendors
The Standard for
success
Every CRE owner and operator is challenged by the Broken Buildings Hierarchy of Needs. In the quest to achieve data quality, sustainability and cost savings, it’s important to align, not compete, with global initiatives like the GRESB Data Quality Standard. While surface-level data from bills and meters show us symptoms of poor performance, impactful action requires deeper knowledge of the root cause. To reach that root cause, we need timely, accurate equipment performance data. I’m optimistic that the GRESB Data Quality Standard will be an invaluable tool on the journey to bring people and planet to the center of building operations.
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