Concrete Innovations at Compass Datacenters

Nancy Novak, Chief Innovation Officer, Compass Datacenters is a firm believer that innovation comes in different forms, and she knows it’s people, processes and systems that drive innovations.

Those three key focuses drive Novak’s work at Compass Datacenters, and she opened up to host Raymond Hawkins about some of the exciting innovations happening at Compass.

Novak’s concentration is on improving the data center construction process. She noted that process efficiencies on the job site hadn’t improved much over the years, even as the technology and building processes have.

“A lot of people will be like, ‘Wait a minute, we do offsite componentry, we do prefab, we do other things that help us,’” Novak said. “I agree with that, but it’s 100% not normalized in our business, and it's done kind of on the fringes. I’m trying to get us to normalize those processes.”

Creating innovations isn’t something done alone in a box. Novak relies on a multitude of ideas from various people. People drive the best ideas and make necessary process improvements. And it isn’t just diversity in ethnicity in people that’s important; it’s also diversity in the experience.

“And in our industry, we have all of them,” Novak said. “I focus on collaborating with all the different layers within our industry.”

Concrete is an important building material in the data center construction process. But what Novak and her team look at is ways to improve that process to make it more efficient, stronger and more sustainable.

“There are so many advantages to concrete,” Novak said. “It’s affordable. It’s readily available. It’s fireproof. CarbonCure is one of the things that helps supplement the cement part of it.”

And Novak mentioned other technologies could be layered on to this process to make it even more sustainable.