About Toby Considine
I am an integrator of the un-integratable, with a long perspective on diverse technologies and systems. I work on the cusp of deep technology and organizational behavior.
I work as an infrastructure analyst, an in-house consulting resource to the Facilities Services group at the University of North Carolina occasionally advise building owners and engineering companies on business strategies. I am a participant in several industry-led international groups defining the interactions between the enterprise, capital assets, building systems, and the power grid. My perspective on these is guided not only by years of practical experience in information technology, but also by long ago academic work in synapses and brain organization; I often see connections where others do not.
Since the midnight phone call certifying that the University’s cogeneration plant was working and therefore the Y2K push was over, my focus has shifted to technology surfaces and standards to interact with engineered systems. The day I read the SOAP v0.9 draft that spring, I was certain that web services would be the surface between the engineered process and those who would interact with it. It is a rare week that this approach does not show me some new potential benefit.
I am co-chair of the OASIS oBIX Technical Committee. oBIX is an unencumbered web service designed to interface between building systems and e-business. I am active in many allied efforts, including the National Building Information Standard (NBIMS) for the design and construction of buildings and the GridWise Architectural Committee’s plans for the transacted open power grid. I am co-champion of the FIATECH Information Technology Roadmap Element 5 (“The Intelligent Self Maintaining, Self Repairing Facility”)
The years at UNC have given me a deeper understanding of the problems and opportunities in capital asset design, construction, and operation than moist in IT. I have been faculty member of APPA’s Institute for Facilities Management. I wrote the UNC Campus Standard for Imaging and Document Management in the early 90’s. I was for some time manager of systems and procedures, aligning business processes and technology.
Before coming to the university, I developed enterprise systems for technology companies (DEC), apparel companies (Reebok), manufacturing plants (Ionics), architectural firms (The Architect’s Collaborative), and media companies old (The Brockton Enterprise) and new (CityNet).
Through it all was the excitement of getting information out of a small operational niche and sharing it with the wider business. Integrating manufacturing with purchasing and then sales, in what we did not yet call ERP, and optimizing warehouse operations for truck deliveries always involved putting a surface on a process, and letting the whole business interact with that surface. This fostered a natural and intuitive progression to today’s web services and service oriented architectures.
And thus my fascination with maturing the processes behind those surfaces into autonomous agents. I believe in entrepreneurial markets, and those agents will be competing in those markets. Proper surfaces will enable competition on raw performance, and that competition will drive innovation in ways I cannot now imagine.
