Here is a TLDR of this week’s Monday Live! session, where we gather each week to untangle the future of smarter buildings. If you’re new here, MondayLive! is a group of industry practitioners sharing personal views, not corporate positions. You can find our profiles and past slide decks at mondaylive.org.
This Month’s Theme: Specifying Information
October is all about “Specifying Information.” Last week, we had a fantastic deep dive into BIM and the construction process. This week, we pivoted to a crucial, and often overlooked, aspect: how do you specify information exchange?
In other words, how do we ensure data can flow seamlessly between different building systems, both during construction and throughout the building’s entire lifecycle? It’s the movement of data that creates real value—static information stuck in a silo doesn’t help anyone.
The Procurement Problem: The 50-Division Box
To understand the challenge, you have to understand how buildings are actually built and paid for. The industry operates on a procurement model defined by the CSI MasterFormat’s 50 Divisions.
Think of these divisions—like Division 23 for HVAC, Division 26 for Electrical, or Division 28 for Electronic Safety and Security—as the only boxes you can check when procuring for a building. If what you’re selling doesn’t fit neatly into one of these boxes, it’s tough to specify and purchase.
This structure, while effective for traditional procurement, creates natural silos. The elevator contractor focuses on their bid package, the electrical contractor on theirs. They often don’t see the bigger picture of how their systems need to talk to each other.
The Brainstorm: What Happens When We Connect the Dots?
We posed a simple brainstorming challenge: randomly pair two divisions and imagine the data that should flow between them. The results were revealing:
- Elevators & Electrical (Divisions 14 & 26): During a demand response event or a blackout, could we strategically control elevator usage to shed load or ensure critical elevators stay on generator power? This operational need is rarely specified, leaving a critical gap between system design and real-world operation.
- Security & Furniture (Divisions 28 & 12): What if high-value art or furniture was tagged with RFID, triggering a security alarm if moved? This interconnected solution has no clear home—the furniture installer doesn’t handle RFID, and the security contractor doesn’t know which assets to track.
These examples highlight a fundamental truth: smarter buildings require us to specify not just equipment, but the relationships between them.
A Living Laboratory: The PAE Living Building Story
In Portland, Oregon, the PAE Living Building stands as a powerful real-world case study. This 50,000-square-foot building is a showcase of modern sustainable systems, featuring solar panels, battery storage, grid connectivity, and advanced building automation. Yet, like so many new constructions, it was delivered with its systems in silos—the lighting, electrical, metering, and HVAC systems all operated independently, with no unified data layer.
This building has now become a living laboratory for https://www.c4sb.org/ the project which demonstrates a radical retrofit of the building’s digital spine, aiming to instrument the building and create a unified, accessible data architecture from these disparate systems. The goal is to show how these systems can be composed into new, cross-functional applications and solutions.
The work here is answering critical questions: How should this have been specified from the start to avoid silos? For the next new construction or major retrofit, how can we change the specifying process to ensure a unified digital outcome? The project will document the tangible benefits—financial, energy, and operational—of this connected approach, providing a blueprint for the industry to follow.
The Solution: A New Workflow for a Connected Future
So, what’s the path forward? Our conversation kept circling back to a few key ideas:
- The Foundation is a Converged IP Network: The absolute “table stakes” for a smart building is getting all systems onto a single, secure IP network. This physical connectivity is the non-negotiable first step.
- Location is the Golden Thread: the one thing tying all divisions together. A simple, enforced requirement to geotag every major asset at installation would be a game-changer for operational efficiency.
- The Digital Twin is the Unifying Layer: The “digital twin” emerges as the modern answer. In this unified virtual representation, these cross-divisional relationships and data exchanges can be managed, visualized, and acted upon.
The key takeaway is that smarter buildings require changes to workflow and specification language. We need to move beyond just specifying equipment and start specifying:
- Data Deliverables: What data must each system provide?
- Interoperability Requirements: How must it connect and communicate with other systems?
- Outcomes: What are the tangible financial, comfort, and energy benefits of this connectedness?
This shift ensures that the handover to the building owner isn’t just a set of keys and binders of PDFs, but a fully operational, data-rich digital ecosystem.
Continue the Conversation at AHR Expo 2026
This is precisely the kind of forward-thinking dialogue that will be front and center at the AHR Expo in Las Vegas, February 2-4, 2026. Our community is actively planning sessions that will bring these concepts to life, focusing on the tangible work of smart building coalitions and showcasing real-world applications. Mark your calendars and check out the evolving session list here:
We’d love to hear your thoughts! How are you tackling information exchange in your projects?
https://www.pae-engineers.com/projects/pae-living-building
