In our previous article, Why 'MSI' No Longer Cuts It: The Rise of the Digital Building Contractor, we argued that integration alone is not enough. A building that connects systems but does not deliver outcomes is not a smart building — it is an expensive one.  

The question is not whether your building is smart. The question is whether it is doing its job.  

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The Drill Problem in Smart Buildings

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In the 1960s, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt famously argued: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

Clayton Christensen later built on this insight to formalise Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory — a way of understanding that people and organisations don’t adopt products for their own sake. They “hire” them to make progress in a specific situation. And when a product no longer helps them make that progress, they “fire” it and look for an alternative.

A job-to-be-done is not the product, the technology, or even the user. It is the underlying progress someone is trying to achieve — the goal, problem, or outcome they are working toward.  

In other words products compete not on features, but on how well they help get that job done.
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Organisations invest in BMS platforms, IoT sensors, digital twin layers, occupancy dashboards, and energy analytics. Each of these is the drill. But too often, the hole — the actual outcome the organisation needs the building to deliver is often not clearly defined .  

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What Is the Job a Building Is Hired to Do?

For most organisations, a building is hired to do a combination of the following:  

• Enable the people inside it to do their best work.  

• Reduce the cost and risk of operating a physical asset.  

• Demonstrate progress against sustainability and ESG commitments.  

• Provide leadership with the confidence to make decisions about space, investment, and people.  

Notice what is not on that list: dashboards, integrations, sensor counts, or platform certifications.  

The challenge is that most organisations have never explicitly agreed on what outcomes they are trying to achieve. When we ask senior leaders what their building is for, we typically get a different answer from the COO, the Head of Facilities, the CPO, and the Head of Real Estate. Not because they disagree, but because the conversation has never been held.  

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Complexity Is a Symptom, Not a Strategy

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A 2023 report from the World Economic Forum found that the built environment accounts for around 37% of global energy-related carbon emissions. Smart building technology is widely cited as one of the most scalable tools for addressing this. Yet the gap between potential and realised value remains significant.  

Some of them are technical: interoperability, data quality, legacy infrastructure. But much of it is strategic. Organisations add use cases, integrations, and data without agreeing on the outcome they're after, or who's accountable for acting on it.

Smart building initiatives naturally accumulate complexity over time. Each addition may be individually justified. Collectively, they obscure the original purpose.  

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Insights Alone Do Not Create Value

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There is an implicit assumption running through most smart buildings: if we provide the data, action will follow.  

Unfortunately, it rarely does.  

The reason is structural. Smart building data crosses functional boundaries, but accountability rarely does. The building generates insights that belong to everyone and therefore to no one.  

Realising value requires three things that the technology cannot provide on its own:  

1. A shared definition of the job  

2. Cross-functional accountability for outcomes  

3. A structured process to continuously refine, adjust, and improve  
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Getting Aligned on the Job: Where to Start

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Applying JTBD thinking to a smart building is not complicated. It requires getting the right people in the room and asking three questions:  

• What does this building exist to enable for the organisation?  

• How do we know it is working?  

• What does failure look like?  

Once the job is agreed, everything else becomes easier to evaluate: which data matters, which integrations are worth maintaining, which initiatives should be prioritised, and where accountability should sit.  

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What This Means for Post-Commission Performance

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Keeping a building aligned with its job requires three ongoing commitments:  

1. Regularly reviewing whether the building is still performing against the agreed job — not just tracking uptime and energy consumption, but asking whether the outcomes that matter to senior leadership are being delivered.  

2. Adjusting strategy and operations when the organisation changes — because the job evolves. A building designed around a five-day office model needs to be re-examined when hybrid becomes the norm.  

3. Building the internal capability to act on what the building tells you — because intelligence without action is just overhead.  
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The Question Worth Asking Now

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If you asked your leadership team today, what is this building's job?  How aligned would the answers be?  

If the answer varies significantly across functions, that gap is worth closing. Because without a shared job definition, even the best-designed smart building will underdeliver.

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