CHICAGO - The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), developers of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building program, have announced LEED Automation, a new program in collaboration with leading technology companies that is designed to streamline the LEED building certification process. LEED Automation enables LEED Online, the online tool used to submit documentation and certify LEED projects, to interact with third party technology platforms.

“LEED Automation takes the green building process to a new level,” said Chris Smith, chief operating officer, USGBC. “We recognized several years ago that we cannot focus only on the evolution of LEED and its continuous improvement. The technology used to administer the LEED certification process is also evolving to increase customers’ business agility through improved data, information, and content integration.”

LEED Automation is said to work similarly to an app. It will perform three key functions for LEED project teams and users of LEED Online by seamlessly integrating third-party applications with LEED Online:

• Provide automation of various LEED documentation processes.

• Deliver customers a unified view of their LEED projects.

• Standardize LEED content and distribute it consistently across multiple technology platforms.

This marks the first time USGBC has opened LEED Online to the software application market and third party software developers. It represents the initial step in what USGBC expects will be the addition of many technology partners in the future.

“LEED Automation allows USGBC and the technology companies to create multi-party interactions versus point-to-point communications between various software applications and IT systems,” said Scot Horst, senior vice president of LEED, USGBC. “This will make the LEED documentation and certification process much more intuitive, and enable our systems to talk to one another with the push of a button.”

The technology agreement also allows communities of independent system, software, and service owners to collaborate dynamically to deliver a richer customer experience. “It is built in accordance with Service Oriented Architecture using Internet standards like HTTP, XML and Simple Object Access Protocol. This makes for a common online language so that in the future, we can further enhance and build upon this work,” said Mahesh Ramanujam, senior vice president of business technology transformation, USGBC.

For more information, visit www.usgbc.org.

Publication date: 12/13/2010