BNP Media put on the Green Intelligent Buildings conference in Arlington, VA this spring. I was there, and gave a talk on what sustainability means to green buildings. Utlimately the message was this: There are 3 steps to maintaining a sustainable building -- measure, analyze, and act. While most think they can measure once and expect the result months later to be the same, the collective view was that people are the most disruptive force to a green building. Continually measuring, analyzing, and acting is what differentiates an audit from sustainability. There were a number of sophisticated companies there, and it was great to learn the different ways that they keep buildings running efficiently. Tridium was quite impressive -- they are wrestling the large Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Schneider Electric of the world and attacking the SMB market (and, it appears, winning). Many people I talked to had either used Tridium or considered using Tridium. With their appliances, they've connected lots of legacy systems (H/VACs, economizers, etc) to an IP infrastructure, whereby it can be managed remotely. Building infrastructure is becoming more and more sophisticated, and it was great to see BacNet/IP, Modbus, and LonWorks tying back into a larger infrastructure. Once the data gets back to a management location, Quality Attributes showed a demo of their impressive dashboard. They've tapped into anything with a pulse -- lighting, H/VAC, occupancy, you name it. With this information, they have a series of sophisticated dashboards that allow you to set targets, budgets, and cost provisions. They even have touchscreens you can install in your building to let occupants see their usage and compete against each other. The important trend is that making buildings more efficient is not just about the data -- sure the data is important but its a means to an end. To make a building more efficient you have to know what to do and how to act on the data. People are a primary contributor to building inefficiency -- by tapping into all the existing information, centralizing it, and knowing the right actions to take -- buildings are adjusted to maintain sustainability every day.