Not sure where to start with ‘Smart Buildings’? This article aims to remove the mystery of workspace technology by providing a pragmatic view of workspace technologies today and in the future.

‘SMART technology is the key to solving our real estate challenges’ is a claim that technology consultants are likely to hear when engaging with real estate leadership and business stakeholders. When the consultant asks what this claim means to their client, the answers vary widely within teams and departments of an organisation, never mind across the entire industry. There is plentiful editorial space telling the real estate sector that ’Smart Buildings‘ and ’Smart Cities‘ are the future growth areas for the sector, and that every occupier should be digitally enabling their workspace. Yet very few can define what ‘Smart’ means to them.

Added to this absence of a definition for Smart Buildings, is the sales hype pushed into the market by solutions providers seeking to promote the use of their SMART solution or product with little to no consideration of whether it is the right answer to a business’s needs in creating and sustaining productive workspaces.

So, where do we start in finding a comprehensive definition of SMART that is meaningful to real estate?

In this article, we are taking the agnostic view of the technology required to make a space ‘Smart’. I.e. we are not considering specific solutions or systems that make up a workspace but the higher-level conceptual principle of how this should be technically architected.

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