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At some point in your career, you’ve likely sat down at your computer and stared at a spreadsheet with rows and rows of figures, and thought to yourself, “This is completely useless to me. I have no earthly idea what this is trying to tell me.”

It’s a truth universally acknowledged: Too much data is just as bad as no data.

“Data itself has no intrinsic value,” says Isaac Chen, vice president, building technology systems for WSP. “Turning data into information is the goal.”

So how do you, in this environment of increasing sophistication of building systems, do that? The challenge is really twofold: First, how do you create a robust, interoperable, integrated smart building automation system that can provide the data you want in a format you need? And secondly, how do you extract and present that data from this system so that it’s actionable, and without suffering from paralysis by analysis?

These are tough questions, made tougher by the fact that most buildings already have a system in place.

“Most commercial buildings were built before 2000, and most controls systems are even older than that,” says Paul Ehrlich, founder and president of Building Intelligence Group. “You have a mix of old and obsolete systems with those that are brand new.”