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Why smart Integrated Facilities Management needs data to fuel it
Your estate’s data is key to driving facilities transformation.
In this blog, Mitie’s Chief Technology and Digital Officer, Cijo Joseph (pictured), explains how to make the most of it.
Today’s increasingly complex buildings and estates require a more sophisticated approach to facilities management. Instead of simply maintaining buildings, there’s a real opportunity to transform the way they operate and cater to user needs. But true facilities transformation relies on one vital ingredient: data.
The right data in the right hands can help you:
- Increase cost effectiveness
- Reduce carbon emissions
- Improve security
- Provide seamless user experiences
The good news is your buildings and estate already produce vast amounts of data. But turning data into insight isn’t easy. Let’s look at the challenges, and why an integrated approach to facilities management can help you connect and contextualise data for the benefit of your entire estate and every user.
Don’t miss data’s nuggets of gold
Having a lot of data is a blessing. It means you have an opportunity to gain insights that are vital to transforming your facilities. But trying to extract those insights can feel like a curse.
You have to be able to gather data from across your estate, contextualise that data and choose the right technologies to support it. You must also safeguard security, privacy and compliance and upskill your teams so they know how to put that data to work.
To further complicate matters, we’re not just talking about structured data that sits neatly in tables. Savvy facilities leaders know that the most transformative insights lie elsewhere. And to make a difference you need to be able to combine structured and unstructured data at scale to reveal hidden truths. That means the data that exists in email threads, Teams chats and snippets of documents – all that stuff that can so easily fall through the gaps but contains nuggets of gold.
It’s a tall order – and one that can require a large amount of investment and time to accomplish. But if you get it right, data can be the driving force behind enhancing your brand and even increasing the value of your property portfolio.
The first step into the future
It can be tempting to jump in and explore how AI helps buildings perform more efficiently. But AI technology is only as good as the data you feed it.
So, first establish a clear data strategy that outlines your goals, ensures data quality and governance and acts as a foundation for everything to follow.
Your goal should be a single, connected ecosystem of data that makes sure people, assets and buildings are catered to across every touchpoint. You can’t have an integrated experience with siloed data – so eradicating silos and removing friction is essential.
Data’s true value lies in the ability to combine and reveal insights that are hidden when looking at things in isolation. For instance, building use data can feed into decisions about cleaning, security, engineering schedules and energy, leading to spills being cleaned before they are seen and assets being fixed before they disrupt operations.
Integrated data for Integrated Facilities Management
This is where integrated facilities management (IFM) holds a significant data advantage. When advanced data capabilities are combined with integrated services, it results in rich insights that give a wider contextual understanding. This can:
- Streamline operations
- Improve efficiency
- Simplify FM processes
With this bird’s-eye view of operations, you can create a full ecosystem of connected services, receiving notifications when visitors arrive, ensuring the correct services and facilities are available and streamlining experiences inside your buildings. It’s about connecting all the tiny dots that make up the full picture.
This is the key to true facilities transformation.
Use data to unIock the power of AI and IFM
AI promises to usher in a step-change in facilities transformation, automating processes and pulling insights from unstructured data to augment human expertise.
However, to take advantage of this emerging technology, organisations need to implement a robust data foundation. This includes ensuring data is gathered from various sources, cleansed and combined to fuel AI and machine learning models. Mitie’s Mozaic 360 insight portal is an all-in-one solution that crunches data from multiple sources, applies AI, and produces insights without the effort of looking for them.
To learn more about how you can build a solid data foundation for your AI activities, read our blog Accurate data: the foundation of good AI for facilities management.
And if you’d like to know about how your organisation could benefit from Integrated Facilities Management, visit our IFM webpage.
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