The Risk of ROI: Return on Inaction
Professionally equipped groups are executing coordinated breaches into buildings, busting down doors, smashing windows, cutting through roofs, and tearing into walls. They arrive in trucks loaded with gear and leave behind a path of destruction within minutes. They don’t ask for permission. They don’t wait for keys. They will get in, no matter what stands in their way.
This is happening 3,500 times a day in the U.S.
Watch this 1-minute video to see:
But these aren’t Criminals.
They’re Heroes: Firefighters coming to save People, Assets (and cats)
And they’re doing this to your smart building, because it didn’t tell them what they needed to know.
- No live floor plans
- No stairwell locations
- No sensor data
- No shutoff or structural data
So they do what they must: improvise with axes, chainsaws, and brute force. Your “intelligent infrastructure” becomes a liability under pressure.
They need to know information about your building quickly to save lives and property, and they do that by deconstructing it.
Captain Christopher Cooper told us the priorities of first responders are:
- Save lives
- Increase firefighter safety
- Then, protect property and assets
If your so-called “smart building” can’t support priorities #1 and #2, it’s actively undermining #3.
At Realcomm 2025, the theme is “The New ROI: Return on Innovation.” It’s a timely focus. The real estate industry is abuzz with AI, digital twins, and smart buildings. But this week, I want to challenge us to ask: How real is your ROI? How real is your innovation? And how real is your building when things go wrong?
Because too often, smart buildings are just shiny dashboards masking fragile, siloed systems. They optimize comfort but can’t handle chaos. They track occupancy but can’t guide a firefighter. They promise intelligence but deliver confusion when every second counts.
Let’s be blunt: Is your “smart” building actually a death trap wrapped in a dashboard?
What Happens When It Gets Real?
During a recent webinar with Fire Chief Victor Esch, we heard stories that should shake every facility owner. Firefighters are falling through roofs. Floor plans are buried in file cabinets. Emergency responders are arriving blind. In one tragic case, a firefighter’s last words were a call to his wife, because no one could locate him in time due to the lack of a floor plan.
The data existed. The building had a dashboard. But the systems couldn’t talk. And no one had access when it mattered.
This isn’t a tech failure. It’s a governance failure. It’s a failure of ownership and a significant missed opportunity.
Watch this video to see:
ROI Reframed: Responsibility Of the Owner
We’ve spent years treating data as a side effect of operations. It’s time to treat it as a core responsibility. As owners, your duty of care is no longer just about energy efficiency or cost savings. It’s about life safety, liability, and leadership.
*When you invest in smart systems but don’t ensure interoperability, you’re not buying innovation, you’re renting risk. You’re accumulating liability. And when you do nothing at all? You’re getting a Return on Inaction.
So let’s flip the ROI acronym:
- Return on Innovation is only real if your data can save lives.
- Return on Investment only works if you’re not rebuilding after every incident.
- Responsibility of the Owner means owning your data, your risk, your readiness.
- Return on Inaction? That’s the broken window. The lawsuit. The fatality. And according to Fire Chief Victor Esch, this is the default condition for nearly every building today, where first responders arrive with no plans, no live access, and no idea what they’re walking into. When data isn’t available, they’re forced to use brute force, smashing your windows, breaking your walls, and tearing apart your assets to save lives in your buildings. Not out of negligence, but out of necessity, because the information they need simply isn’t available when it matters most.
Ask yourself:
- Do you control your building’s data, or does your vendor?
- Can your systems interoperate without human middleware?
- Is your digital twin just a 3D rendering, or can it help responders navigate a burning building?
- If someone died in your facility, could you prove you took reasonable precautions?
- What’s the total cost of risk? Of breaking your own assets to save lives?
Because that’s the real ROI, that’s the new standard of care. The real cost isn’t in the technology; it’s in what happens when your building becomes a problem instead of a solution.
Questions I’m Asking at Realcomm
This week, as I attend Realcomm, I’ll be asking owners:
- How real is your innovation?
- How real is your data?
- How open is your ecosystem?
- Do you have a common language for your systems, your AI, your staff, and your responders?
- Can your building help save a life, or will it stand in the way?
If you’ve got answers, or if you’re rethinking what you’ve been sold, find me. Let’s talk. Let’s map it out. Let’s make it real.
From the Tiger Team to You
As part of the C4SB Semantic Tiger Team, I’m collaborating with an extraordinary group of experts across multiple domains, from ontologies and control logic to real-time and sensor networks, who are tackling one of the biggest challenges in our industry: making building systems interoperable, actionable, and safe by design.
At the C4SB session at Realcomm, you’ll hear from voices across this spectrum. Contributors include leaders from Project Haystack, Brick Schema, ASHRAE 223P/231P, RealEstateCore, IFC/BIM communities, and the Linux Foundation. Each brings a distinct lens, from operational metadata to declarative control logic to lightweight digital twin deployment. Yet, we are united by a shared goal: to break silos and enable connected intelligence.
I’m contributing from the perspective of cloudBIM and BIMJSON, demonstrating how we can strip away complexity and deliver live, interoperable building data where it matters most now. It’s not just about managing assets. It’s about protecting people, reducing risk, and empowering response.
This work isn’t hypothetical. It’s real infrastructure, tested in pilots, built with open tools, and shared openly. And I’ll be writing more about what emerges from these conversations in the weeks to come.
Because in the end, the smartest thing a building can do isn’t optimize. It can protect.
Let’s make that the new baseline. Let’s make it open. Let’s make it interoperable.
Let’s make it Real at Realcomm!
More to come after the Realcomm sessions are over.
