Information overload to professional authority: getting on top of information management lifts FM up the value chain

Most of us already know this is broken, what has been missing is a clean way to fix it.

The timing is not accidental. Regulation is shifting from periodic compliance to continuous accountability. Safety regimes increasingly expect a golden thread of information, not retrospective explanations. ESG has moved from aspiration to disclosure-grade evidence. Hybrid working has changed how performance, utilisation and experience are judged.

At the same time, digital tools promise insight – analytics, dashboards, digital twins – but only deliver value when the underlying information is coherent, structured and trusted.

For FM, this pressure can feel like another burden. In reality, however, it is also leverage, because this is precisely where organisations now need what FM already understands: how buildings actually operate, where risk really sits and how decisions made upstream play out over time.

But leverage only works when information holds together.

One deliberate choice in the guide was not to start with technology. FM has seen enough system deployments to know that software amplifies whatever sits beneath it – good or bad.

Instead, the guide takes an information-first position and asks practical questions that FM leaders deal with every day:

This is not another maturity model designed to score organisations, it is a way to see where confidence is leaking and why. To make that visible, the guide introduces the Five-Layer Model.

The model reflects how information actually behaves in organisations:

None of this will surprise experienced FM professionals, which is the point. What often is overlooked is how tightly these layers depend on one another. Most information failures show up at handover, and every one of these layers is involved. New technology cannot compensate for unclear responsibility and good data decays without consistent processes. ESG commitments collapse without an auditable information trail.

The model gives FM leaders a way to diagnose problems without defaulting to blame – or buying another system.

When information is treated seriously, something subtle but important shifts in the FM role. Conversations change. FM stops being asked to find data and starts being asked to interpret it. Assurance is designed into operations rather than rebuilt for each audit. Lifecycle value can be explained calmly, without defensiveness.

This is what moving up the value chain looks like in practice.

It does not require FM to control every upstream decision, which, frankly, we don’t. But it does require us to stop accepting poor information as inevitable. Doing this well usually reduces work over time, but shifts the effort earlier, when it is cheaper and more effective.

Structured information allows FM to connect capital decisions to operational reality, provide regulator- and investor-grade evidence without constant revalidation and enable digital tools to work as intended.

FM sits at the centre of a wider ecosystem: asset owners, investors, insurers, regulators, service providers – all rely on the same information being reliable and they all suffer when it isn’t.

When FM leads on information maturity, alignment follows. Handover stops being a cliff edge and compliance stops being episodic. Technology investments start to scale instead of fragment.

This is also where standards and sector initiatives matter – not as bureaucracy, but shared language. They give FM practice something defensible to anchor to, especially when challenged.

Professions gain influence when they provide certainty in complex environments. FM already understands complexity. What we have sometimes lacked is the structural confidence that information maturity brings.

Writing the guide was not about adding workload. It was about reducing friction – making information easier to trust, easier to reuse and easier to stand behind. Because information management, done well, is not an administrative overhead: it is a leadership capability.

When FM gets on top of information, it stops being seen as the place where problems land – and starts being recognised as the place where insight lives.

So the main goal of the guide is not smarter systems: it is to empower our profession to own our information and to show our boards and our people that when FM has informed leadership, we are not a cost centre but a value engine.

Download the IWFM information management best practice guide.

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