In early 2006 I went to Washington D.C. to attend a two-day meeting at the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). A deep green engineer named Kevin Hydes had introduced me to a green building consultant and author named Scot Horst. Scot was the co-chair of the LEED Steering committee, whose mandate was and is to oversee the development and promotion the LEED green building rating system.

LEED -- a community effort by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of contributing experts -- is a set of building design and operations objectives that any architect, engineer, owner or developer can aspire to, that helps them arrive at a healthier, less expensive, cheaper to operate, and more community and planet friendly building. Everything from tiny houses to huge new communities are addressed and supported.

The cornerstones of the USGBC's programs are education, and a peer reviewed rating system. It's a carrot and stick approach. If you do well, you get not only a better building, you get a plaque. It's not easy to get that plaque.

Buildings consume about 45% of produced energy and throw off about 48% of greenhouse gases. In most parts of the world, it is now possible to build zero carbon communities. Possible, but far from probable.

What I like best about the USGBC is how clear they are about how to get where they are going. You might think that green buildings, or climate change, or health, or productivity, or countless other real benefits of a green building figure prominently in their mantra. They do not.

The mantra of the United States Green Building Council is Market Transformation.

They are pragmatists and believers, a lovely combination. Above all, the USGBC is about getting it done.

And they are getting it done, with a lot of help from their friends, including iLiv.

iLiv has, since 2006, been a key partner of the USGBC's certification arm, the Green Business Certification Institute (GBCI). Here are a few facts of note:

  • More than 50,000 projects have been certified using our platform.
  • When they and we started, the count was a few hundred.
  • 5,000 new projects a year are automatically created and populated in our system whenever one of their customers launches a review.
  • We speak weekly with GBCI managers and/or analysts, and have done so for more than 11 years.
  • Each and every reviewer and certification administrator has their own unique view of what they have to do next across 50,000 projects.
  • Every task of every process of every project is planned and tracked in real time, and years of this data is used to optimize both individual workflows as well as the underlying processes themselves.
  • In the early days of LEED, the explosive success of the program left the certifiers scrambling to keep up. Errors, redundancies, and late reviews threatened the viability of the entire enterprise.
  • Today the on-time rate is above 98%, QA is top-notch, and customers can find out the status of their review in a few minutes.

The GBCI and USGBC use numerous software platforms, such as SAP, Salesforce, and Microsoft, and they periodically survey their users. iLiv's software consistently tops the list. One manager says he never hears about iLiv at all, and only wished that were true of the other tools.

Clearly, the USGBC is an ideal client and partner. They are motivated and focused, with a long-term objective they honor deeply, that will literally change the world. We couldn't be more proud of our work with them.

Our products excel at helping managers organize, workers execute, and analysts optimize a high volume of repeatable yet variable workflows of a duration that delivers frequent feedback for constant improvement. We make poor results obsolete. Risk mitigation is built in.