Learnings Networks and Professional Development in Building Energy Management Systems Industry

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present a qualitative study regarding the educational networks/resources available for professional workers in the field of building services in light of the energy transition. It is an interesting topic, however there are some points to take into consideration:

1.- What do you mean by energy transition? How is it relevant in the implementation of new technologies into BEMS?

2.- There is need of background information in regard the use of knowledge management systems in the field.

3.- Sections 1.2 and 1.3 are very extensive. They should be placed in an independent "Theoretical framework" section.

4.- Introduction does not state clearly the objective or purpose of the study.

5.- Methods section lacks specification. You chose 3 companies you consider "representative" of the field. What was the criteria for this? How many companies related to the field exist in the country?  I believe studying only three companies hardly provide "a clear overview of the current statue of the field". If so, please justify your statement.

6.- How where the interviews conducted? Who was interviewed within the companies? How many participants?

7. - Results section provides a summary of (I assume) the answers from the interviews. That is fine, just make reference to table 1 and 2 within text.

8. - Discussion should highlight similarities and differences of the answers between the three companies, identifying the key elements that appear relevant in the approximation of educational strategies.

Also, I would suggest a change in the title since the concept of energy transition plays an almost negligible role in the manuscript.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We highly appreciate your comments and feedbacks on our manuscript. They helped us to modify and improve our text.

Here we addressed your comments as follows;

1.- What do you mean by energy transition? How is it relevant in the implementation of new technologies into BEMS?

Answer 1. 

First, thank you for your questions and feedback on our paper. In the first paragraph, we tried to very explicitly explain our point of view about “energy transition”;

“This specific topic is chosen because the building services are responsible for the majority of a building’s energy use. Building services are becoming increasingly complex, and therefore optimal use is not always guaranteed. BEMS are increasingly installed and generate a significant amount of data that could be used for predictive maintenance, commissioning, and fault detection and diagnosis of the systems. The sector is facing significant challenges related to the energy transition, which is the suitable learning educational infrastructure for professionals. Stricter energy performance regulations and higher comfort expectations make those buildings more heavily equipped with complex systems which often generate data. Because of those developments in the sector, solely knowledge about HVAC systems is no longer enough. HVAC consultants, contractors, and maintenance companies are suddenly also expected to have knowledge about data management and data analytics techniques [1].”

To summarize, new technologies have enabled us to collect and generate more data about buildings. These data can be applicable in many different areas, and also they can bring new changes and challenges in the field which we know as energy transition. The transition from old systems with no or limited access to data about energy management in the building toward more advanced systems generates more complex data. This new explanation added to the newly revised text, But if you think we need to explain it more clearly, then we can revise the text accordingly.

Question 2. 
There is need of background information in regard the use of knowledge management systems in the field.

Thank you for your comment. Reviewing literature revealed that there is no research that has been explicitly focused on knowledge management in the energy management systems industry. Most of the research is in the field of the Gas and oil industry. Although there are close to each other, we discussed not going deeply into knowledge management in the gas and oil field because that was not our focus of research here. But still, based on the reviewer's comments, we can elaborate more about the background of knowledge management.

Question 3. Sections 1.2 and 1.3 are very extensive. They should be placed in an independent "Theoretical framework" section.

We revised and reframe the introduction now based on your comment. Hopefully, now it is more clear for our readers.

Question 4. Introduction does not state clearly the objective or purpose of the study.
Thank you for this comment. By redefining the research question, revising the introduction section (also based on your previous comments), and stating our aims and connect it to our results section, we tried to improve our text and solve this issue with our introduction.

Question 5. Methods section lacks specification. You chose 3 companies you consider "representative" of the field. What was the criteria for this? How many companies related to the field exist in the country?  I believe studying only three companies hardly provide "a clear overview of the current statue of the field". If so, please justify your statement.

We appreciate your comment. Our criteria for choosing these three companies were their functions in the field. Our aim was to investigate the educational technologies in these companies. So, one of these companies focus was completely on education, one combined education with practice and one only on the implementation and practical part of work. So, we strongly believe there are at least good examples of our educational systems works in the energy management systems industry. We have around 15 major companies with a focus on energy management systems in the Netherlands.

Based on your comment, we decided to revise our statement and mention the following;

“ …and studying these companies can be considered as an example of how current statue of this field performing”.

Question 6. How where the interviews conducted? Who was interviewed within the companies? How many participants?

Thank you for raising this question. These interviews were conducted online. Two interviews were with the educational manager/representative of companies and one with the main board/adviser of the company. In all of these interviews, three researchers interviewed one of the members of each company.
This extra information was added to the methodology section;

“Two interviews were with educational manager/representative of companies and one with the main board/adviser”.

Question 7. Results section provides a summary of (I assume) the answers from the interviews. That is fine, just make reference to table 1 and 2 within text.

We revised the results section and added the following paragraph at the beginning of the results section to make it more clear and reference to tables 1 and 2;

Here we present the results of these interviews with three different organizations. Our results were divided into 5 different sections for each of our cases. You can find the summary of the first three sections (Organization culture, learning network, and incentive structures) in table 1, and the summary of the second section (challenges, future direction, and boundary crossing) in table 2.

Question 8. Discussion should highlight similarities and differences of the answers between the three companies, identifying the key elements that appear relevant in the approximation of educational strategies. Also, I would suggest a change in the title since the concept of energy transition plays an almost negligible role in the manuscript.

Thank you for your feedback. We just changed the title accordingly to a new title, which we believe represents the context of this study.

Reviewer 2 Report

The title indicates the examining the learnings network is for energy transition. However, there is no mentioning of such literature on how learning networks can be used to promote energy transition. The link between learning networks and energy transition is missing from the introduction and literature review. 

The method needs more details and descriptions. Who were interviewed on behalf of the organizations? Why the three organizations can be representative in the field of study or stakeholders for energy transition? How the interviews were analysed? 

 

Author Response

First comment. The title indicates the examining the learnings network is for energy transition. However, there is no mentioning of such literature on how learning networks can be used to promote energy transition. The link between learning networks and energy transition is missing from the introduction and literature review.

Answer 1. 

Dear reviewer,
We appreciate your feedback and valuable comments on our manuscript.

Considering the first part of your comments, we also believe that the previous title was not a suitable representation of our goal for this paper. Therefore, based on your comment, we decided to change the title, and add more explanation about the educational challenges that energy transition brings to the energy management systems industry.

Second comment. The method needs more details and descriptions. Who were interviewed on behalf of the organizations? Why the three organizations can be representative in the field of study or stakeholders for energy transition? How the interviews were analysed?

Answer 2. 

Thank you for asking these important questions. In these interviews, two educational managers/representatives of the organization and a main board member/adviser of the company joined us on behalf of the organization.

Our criteria for choosing these three companies were their functions in the field. Our aim was to investigate the educational technologies in these companies. So, one of these companies focus was completely on education, one combined education with practice and one only on the implementation and practical part of work. So, we strongly believe, there are at least good examples of educational systems in the energy management systems industry.

The interviews are recorded and then transcribed using Otter.ai. Based on the answers, different codes were defined by the researchers to categorize and investigate the organizational culture, educational networks, incentive structures, main problems and challenges, companies’ future direction, and the most important aim of interviews which is exploring the technologies used for educational purposes. The requested explanations added to the manuscript.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for your reply and addressing the issues I previously stated. The article has been improved. I suggest a thorough grammar and spelling check before it can be accepted.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We are glad to see our previous revisions were satisfactory. Also, we highly appreciate your comments and feedback, which helped us improve our main draft. Finally, based on your last comment, every sentence of our text was checked and revised to prevent any grammatical errors and mistakes.

Warm regards,