The cable guy

27 October, 2009

George Bartley began his career as a systems engineer with the Airways Corporation of New Zealand, working on air traffic control centres. Now he heads a company which uses the latest wireless radio mesh technology to promote more sustainable workplaces.

Building Sustainability is a technology company which has developed a carbon tracking web service combined with wireless sub-metering to help companies identify energy wastage in their buildings. It is part of the Cordless Group, which focuses on the impact of new technology on people, business and the built environment.

For Bartley, the most important, yet underestimated, force enabling change in the workplace is the internet coupled with wireless technology. Properly harnessed, he says, the technology will transform the way we use buildings, and, importantly, improve building performance. The end result will be a happier and more productive workforce. He gives the example of the modern car – highly personalised, with an easily readable history, it will tell you when it needs a service. It can even provide you with feedback on how to drive it more efficiently.

Bartley first trained as an electronics engineer and worked on refurbishing New Zealand’s air traffic control centres. Next he joined Swedish telco Ericsson, helping to launch mobile networks in New Zealand.

The role meant looking at new enterprise technology and working with new office communications systems, which was his introduction to the office sector. Given the choice of going into large mobile networks or the office, he chose the latter.

In 1994 he moved to the UK, where he worked for Ericsson on launching the first cordless telephone systems based on a new European standard called DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) – a technology that was going to transform the office along with wireless LAN technology.

While working with Ericsson he met Philip Ross, Cordless Group’s CEO, and they set about interpreting how wireless technology was going to change the office. They envisaged offices more geared to collaboration, where people were not tied to workstations and could work within multiple work settings. Bartley describes this as ‘the beginning of the journey into changing the office’.

Bartley joined Cordless in 2001 as an associate consultant working on new workplace projects and helping manufacturers bring new technologies into the market. He also worked on wireless technology and its role in transforming the delivery of healthcare services in homes and in hospitals. It was through a consultancy project for the British Library that a new company, Building Zones, was founded.

The head of facilities at the library, John de Lucy, wanted to make the library a place for the public to work as well as read. Bartley explains: ‘We came up with a recommendation to create a wireless work zone in the library. So if you go to the library now there is a place called the King’s Library Workzone, which is a combination of wireless technology and innovative furniture. For example, there is seating designed by Bene with power feeding through the arm of the chair, which is also a surface to work on; and the tables are also designed for mobile workers.’

Through Building Zones, Bartley began looking at how buildings can be improved to meet the needs of non-employees, like visiting professionals. He points out: ‘As you know, if you’re not on the payroll, businesses will put lots of barriers to stop you getting access to their valuable information assets.

‘But at the same time, this prevents you from accessing valuable services which enable you to be more productive and therefore benefit their business.’

Bartley’s answer was the workplace digital concierge, which runs on a secure network separate from an organisation’s LAN. This kind of product sends digital alerts to devices like laptops and smartphones, promoting services available within the workspace.

In 2006, under pressure to change the way it consumed energy, the Royal Bank of Scotland commissioned Bartley and his team to install a digital concierge at one of its bases to study the effectiveness of a number of sustainability initiatives. The bank wanted to test the performance of micro-renewables like solar-thermal panels, photovoltaic panels, biomass boilers, wind turbines, rainwater harvesting, and self-cleaning glass. The idea was to create a presentation of the actual performance of the technology and work out the payback.

Bartley says: ‘The pinnacle of that project was a piece of technology that allowed staff to wear a service token, essentially a radio locator associated with a personal profile for building energy controls such as heating and lighting, so we could actually measure and control energy use down to an individual level.’ Once again, the work translated into a new company, Building Sustainability, and the development of a web-enabled real-time carbon footprint tracking system.

The technology involves connecting software to building management systems, enabling lighting, heating and work settings to come on and offline in response to the presence of employees. This not only minimises energy consumption, it potentially provides information showing how much energy an individual is responsible for using.

This research has led Bartley to spread the message that internet technologies can make it simple to get energy information out of a building which has traditionally been put in the ‘too difficult basket’. He explains: ‘There are key technologies coming on the market which aren’t being used, like mesh radio technology. This makes it simple to install sensors, such as meters, to collect information, or an actuator to switch it on and off. In the past you had to have a wire to the meter,

and wires to the controller. Mesh radio can do that reliably and wirelessly, so while in the past there might have been one or two meters in the building, in the future we’ll see hundreds, maybe thousands of meters and controllers going into buildings. Ultimately, we can get down to desk-level monitoring to see how much energy an individual is using.

‘We’re just not aware of how brilliant the internet is. Until two or three years ago there were limited addresses within the internet. Then IP version 6 was introduced and there are enough addresses now for just about every grain of sand on the planet. This has taken down huge barriers; it means, for instance, that it could be possible to link internet-connected devices between home and work.’

One challenge, he says, is the need to bridge the gap between ‘information islands’ within and across clusters of buildings. His answer is to use low-cost internet devices to bring together the information gathered by the meters on to a single platform for analysis. ‘That’s the journey we’ve been on. This whole idea of breaking down “information islands” is really our opportunity and we can do that very simply because there is a huge stack of buildings with either no building management system or closed building management systems. Using internet-enabled technology you can either bypass those BMS or connect to them and get the information you need into a single repository to do your analysis.’

The impact of WiFi on office layout is another big change. He says: ‘It’s a huge enabler for increasing utility in the office. We used to have typewriters and telephones that anchored us to one location. But activity- based work settings are as much about looking at the workspace as part of the business process. You would look at what you need to do to be successful in your business, whether you need to have meetings, brainstorms, solve problems, and then ask what sort of spaces you need to do that.’

The high-speed WiFi needed to facilitate this did not exist two years ago. However, the latest generation wireless technology can offer the high speeds needed, and this is expected to change the physical workspace. So individuals may no longer need their own fixed desk. But what if they need a pen and pad? ‘You’d simply get that from a different place,’ says Bartley. ‘You might have resource rooms sprinkled around the activity-based work settings. The environment becomes more about people being comfortable as well as having everything they need; then they are more productive, much more energised, and happier.’

But Bartley believes the built environment industry is generally resistant to the idea of introducing new technology. ‘We’re building buildings that are 20 years out of date; they are opening today, and we’ll flood them with cabling because that’s low risk, we know it will work. But it will be out of date in a few years’ time, and you won’t get a good return on your developer’s investment because the building won’t be desirable. This is where groups like CIBSE and the Building Research Establishment have a valuable role to educate people as to what’s best practice.’

Bartley has been encouraged to see the design and build sector starting to integrate service packages which have traditionally been managed separately, such as office furniture, IT and mechanical and electrical engineering. He believes the wireless revolution of the workplace will continue, adding: ‘I think Britain should be at the forefront of it. It’s just a question of bringing people together. You still see IT conferences separate from FM conferences, and you really need to bring them together.’

Further information

www.cordless.co.uk