IP-Enabled Energy Management: A Proven Strategy for Administering Energy as a Service

Chapter 10

Preparing for the Next Big Thing

With a secure program in place and budgets set, you can turn your attention to the bigger pic-

ture. At this point, you and a small core team of people will need to decide where the program

is heading three to five years out. This level of strategic thinking and planning is a logical

extension of the topics we covered in the preceding chapter. However, you have ample room for

innovation and leadership in deciding the future of your management program. At the time of

this writing, we are in this phase of futures assessment, so what we cover in this chapter is theo-

retical. What is practical is our application of the same business and technology criteria to the

resource management options we are considering. Please view the content in this chapter as our

opinion on how energy management technologies will evolve and integrate. With that in mind,

in this chapter you will learn the following:

What adjacent technologies and business priorities might impact or be affected by an

•u

energy management program

How user behavior and governmental reporting might be affected by managed energy

•u

How an energy management program might evolve into a full workload and natural re-•u

source management program

Chart Your Course

The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.

Thomas Reid

At some point, your program might become a full-fledged business unit with its own profit and

loss statement. Or, as we recommended earlier, you might simply get energy management to a

point where it is fully integrated into one or several operations. Where it goes depends on your

leadership’s understanding of value, placement, and growth. We tried to avoid the theoretical

in this book and to present a more how-to focus. However, it is important to have a basic trajec-

tory planned out ahead of time. This helps to avoid surprises while building morale within your

team because it demonstrates our oh-so-human need for progress.

In our case, we had deep passion for technology, architecture, and the environment. We had

both decided independently that applying our technical knowledge to some greater good was

important. John’s experience with utilities and software engineering, along with mine in envi-

ronmental sciences and facilities, pushed us toward energy management. From energy, we saw

distinct similarities across a wide range of natural resource management applications. Water is

the most obvious, but we also considered the more complex but much needed ones such as the

source, transfer, and fate of pollutants. With all this as background, we cannot provide a guide

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