IBM: Raising the IQ of School Buildings

Schools across the United States are discovering that bringing greater intelligence and connectedness into a building’s operations can help create more efficient, sustainable and profitable campuses.

Public schools in Portland, Ore., are using smarter buildings software and analytics to identify needed repairs quickly—from broken lights and pipes to faulty heating systems—and then get them done quickly and efficiently.

The Los Angeles public school system is empowering its thousands of students, teachers and staff to act as living sensors by using their mobile phones to identify maintenance issues quickly.

The Clark County School District in Las Vegas went from just reacting to emergency work orders to making data-driven, predictive decisions on the thousands of maintenance requests generated from its 392 schools and administrative buildings.

Thanks to smarter buildings software, the Palm Beach County, Fla., school district can keep track of which facilities are in use and which are vacant, and streamline the leasing process, which will result in a lot of extra—and needed—income. For example, by better using its buildings, streamlining the leasing process and modernizing its management capabilities, leasing campus vacancies during non-school hours to commercial and nonprofit organizations helped the district generate $4.5 million in 2012.

Tulane University’s School of Architecture is reimagining its century-old Richardson Memorial Hall in New Orleans as an energy-efficient “living laboratory” that collects real-time data from sensors on boilers, air ducts, lights, water pipes and other things.

The City University of New York has a new system that lets facility staff track and analyze energy use, compare school buildings’ energy efficiencies, forecast power needs, and run simulations on building improvements to predict the benefits of various retrofitting projects.