How ‘think globally, act locally’ went wrong for investment banking firm

When an investment banking firm began creating its smart buildings program for a global rollout, they enlisted vendors and expected them to deliver what they promised and trusted that everything would fit together and do what they needed it to do. But that’s not what happened.

See how they went from disaster to success, including:

• Aligning various internal and external stakeholders
• Developing a proper data structure
• Building multilayered dashboards
• Documenting and scaling a global smart buildings program

• Aligned various internal and external stakeholders 
• Developed a proper data structure
• Built multilayered dashboards 
• Documented and scaled global smart buildings program

When an investment banking firm began creating its smart buildings program for a global rollout, they enlisted vendors and expected them to deliver what they promised and trusted that everything would fit together and do what they needed it to do. But after implementing a variety of products and services, it quickly became apparent that the vendors did not understand the dynamics of the firm’s networks, where all their data was, the types of systems they already had in place, or the organizational hurdles to expect with a large global firm. As a result, the strategies they implemented and solutions they deployed led to dropped networks and offline devices, completely disabling them and severely impacting operations at several large global sites. It was a big disaster, and after investing a lot of time, effort, and money, they had to roll it back and start a new process.

The firm employed a third-party vendor to clean up, organize, and get their data into the new platform, in the hopes of getting it to work for them. But in the meantime, their internal smart buildings team was creating dashboards and didn’t understand why the operations team wasn’t using them. There was a disconnect between stakeholders, and there was no one to bring them all together and get everyone on the same page.

Enter JLL Technologies (JLLT).

The firm invited JLLT’s smart building’s team to help bridge the gap between the stakeholders, so everyone—including developers, operations, the smart buildings team, and executives—could get what they needed out of the program. The JLLT team helped identify the issues and determine what they needed to do to course correct. First, they needed to determine why they were doing things a certain way and what they hoped to get out of it. Questions like, “Why are you collecting certain data?,” “What are the use cases?,” and “Where is the value add?” needed to be answered

The in-depth discussions led to a complete set of mockups for three layers of dashboards that all of the stakeholders agreed upon to ensure their global smart buildings program covered resiliency, performance, comfort, notifications, and alarms. The mockups helped them identify the data they needed to capture and clean, develop the use cases, and get their platform effectively working for them.

The program also needed to be documented. JLLT developed guidelines for how the program will run, including technical guidelines and specifications, what the organizational structure is, who the stakeholders are, and how it impacts the firm’s business moving forward.

JLLT helped the firm align all stakeholders and get consensus on what was needed—and what wasn’t. This significantly increased engagement for their smart buildings’ platform. It also led to identifying other challenges that that needed to be solved, including:

• Streamlining manual processes and developing a proper data structure
• Deploying a unified technology team for new construction projects
• Upgrading networks and designing a global operational technology (OT) network
• Rolling out the smart buildings program to global sites
• Maintaining ownership and control over the data structure, security, and network management while onboarding/offboarding vendors as needed
• Developing a technology success program to ensure the smart buildings program continues to deliver value for all stakeholders, as the buildings, people, and organization change over time
  
  

The JLLT team has been a significant asset to me. They’ve implemented best practices, bridged the gap between operations and IT, helped us reduce risk, and continue to collaborate with us to build a sustainable smart buildings practice that will grow with us.

Head of Global Smart Buildings Practice