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Eating the Elephant: A Practical Path to Intelligent Buildings

April 8, 2026 | Scott Lanigan, Director of Intelligent Buildings, Newcomb & Boyd
4 min read
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The Elephant in the Room – and Why We Keep Ignoring It
There is a joke I have used to guide my team for over thirty years: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." It's silly. It's also genuinely wise – because it cuts straight to the core of how humans respond when a problem feels too big to define, too slow-moving to feel urgent, and too overwhelming to know where to start. We either freeze, or we panic and grab the nearest fix whether or not it actually solves anything.

That is exactly where most organizations find themselves with their building portfolios – and the consequences are more immediate than most leadership teams realize.


Facilities staff are stretched thin. Institutional knowledge is walking out the door through retirements, and we are working with clients right now suffering the consequences. Building systems are more complex than ever. And despite decades of investment in automation systems, analytics platforms, and "smart" technologies – most of it deployed in disconnected waves – organizations still struggle to answer one deceptively simple question:


"Do you know what equipment you have, how it's running, what condition it's in – and when it will fail?"


For most building owners, the honest answer is no. But here's the harder truth: even when organizations recognize the problem, they struggle to agree on what it actually is. Facilities, finance, operations, and leadership each bring their own perspective. It's the parable of the blind men and the elephant – one touches the trunk and thinks it's a snake, another touches the ear and thinks it's a fan, a third touches the leg and thinks it's a tree. When stakeholders can't agree on what they're looking at, how do you name it – let alone solve it?


The answer is observability. To step back far enough to see the whole elephant.


A Path Forward – One Bite at a Time

The goal of an intelligent building initiative is not a technology deployment. It is full observability into what you have, how it is functioning, and how much longer you can count on it. Reaching that goal requires a deliberate path – not a single initiative, and certainly not a panicked technology purchase.


Start by defining where you are. Before planning the journey, you need an honest picture of your current state. What systems do you actually have? What is the condition of your buildings, assets, and technology? This means real assessments – not assumptions based on as-built drawings, but ground-truth data on what is installed, how it is performing, and where the gaps are. You cannot plan from a map you don't trust.


Align your organization on where you want to go. This step is underestimated almost universally. What does success actually look like? How will you know when you've gotten there? Defining short, mid, and long-term KPIs gives facilities, finance, operations, and leadership a shared language and scorecard. Without this alignment, every initiative gets pulled in competing directions.


Stop the bleeding. With a clear baseline and shared goals, define the standards and governance structure that ensure every dollar spent moves the organization closer to its goals. If a proposed investment doesn't advance the strategy, you don't do it. This discipline separates organizations that make steady progress from those that accumulate more fragmented technology with each budget cycle.


Build on success. Now – and only now – deploy technology in earnest. Start with a focused pilot. Demonstrate value. If the pilot generates savings, reinvest those savings into the next step. Progress funds progress. This builds organizational confidence and avoids the common failure mode of enterprise-wide rollouts that collapse under their own weight.


The end state creates something beyond efficiency gains or energy savings – it creates resilience. When systems are well-understood and well-documented, the organization is no longer dependent on the single person holding all the institutional knowledge. That expertise becomes embedded in the system itself, not lost when they retire.


How Newcomb & Boyd Can Help

At Newcomb & Boyd, we have helped organizations across healthcare, higher education, and complex commercial portfolios navigate exactly this journey. The challenges are consistent: fragmented technology investments, siloed stakeholders, and a widening gap between what leadership thinks is happening in their buildings and what is actually happening.


Our consulting and strategy services help organizations start the right way – defining goals, aligning stakeholders, and building the governance frameworks that make every subsequent investment count.


Our Facility Condition Assessments deliver the ground-truth baseline that makes honest planning possible – grounded not just in age and condition, but in performance and risk across the full portfolio.


Through Monitoring-Based Commissioning as a Service, we provide ongoing observability backed by engineering expertise – ensuring systems perform as intended, especially during the critical warranty and early operations window when problems are cheapest to fix.


With Capital Asset Planning as a Service, we help translate data into defensible investment roadmaps – so capital decisions are driven by actual performance, not assumptions and spreadsheets.


For clients who want to buy outcomes rather than tools, these services work together as a fully managed solution – combining automated functional testing, MBCx and fault detection, and capital planning into a single, integrated engagement.


The elephant is real. It is large. And it is not going anywhere.


But it doesn't have to be eaten all at once – just approached deliberately, with clear goals, honest data, and a commitment to progress over perfection.


One bite at a time.

Scott Lanigan, Director of Intelligent Buildings, Newcomb & Boyd
Scott Lanigan is Director of Intelligent Buildings at Newcomb & Boyd, bringing 30 years of experience leading organizations at the intersection of technology and building operations. Over 15 years, he led one of the world's largest FDD platform deployments, spanning hundreds of buildings and nearly 100 million square feet, driving measurable gains in energy efficiency and operational performance. Scott helps clients leverage building technology to modernize portfolios and reduce operational costs.

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Newcomb & Boyd is a market leader delivering intuitive, high-performance engineering solutions that meet practical, environmental, and financial goals. Building on a 100-year legacy of innovation, we design spaces that inspire and perform. We are committed to decarbonization, sustainability, resiliency, and intelligent buildings. Learn more at www.newcomb-boyd.com.