The built environment has an identity crisis

Even organizations with disciplined document management run into this problem. A document repository can answer what records exist on file, but it can’t answer what has happened to a specific physical asset over its operating life.

A recent industry analysis found that as veteran facility managers retire, change jobs, or move on, decades of undocumented building knowledge often leave with them, since that knowledge frequently lives in someone’s head rather than in a system. The same analysis cited IFMA projections that more than 45% of facility management professionals worldwide will retire in the next decade, a wave that will test how well institutional memory survives personnel turnover.

That is the same failure described in two different ways. Whether the loss is a retiring engineer who carries undocumented knowledge out the door, or a repository that can’t say what a structure can and cannot support after decades of alterations, the cause is identical. Nothing in these systems persistently follows the physical asset itself. The record lives with the software, the vendor, or the employee, never with the infrastructure.

This is where the stakes sharpen. In a post-failure scenario, structural engineers, investigators, and insurers are not simply looking for a folder of drawings. They need a reliable, continuous chain of custody for every material change made to a structure, traceable back to who made it, when, and under what code cycle. A binder handed off at turnover cannot provide this.

The same need extends well beyond structural engineering. Fire departments responding to an active incident, emergency management agencies coordinating a response, FEMA assessing damage after a disaster, insurance adjusters evaluating a claim, building officials issuing permits or certificates of occupancy, and urban search and rescue teams operating inside a compromised structure all depend on the same continuous history of what a building is, what it can support, and what has changed.

What emergency response actually requires is closer to a vehicle identification number for a piece of physical infrastructure, a persistent identifier that every contractor, engineer, permitting office, and software platform can reference over decades, regardless of who owns the data or which system created it.

Imagine trying to investigate an aircraft if every maintenance record was stored under a different numbering system every time ownership changed. That would be unacceptable in aviation, but it remains normal for buildings.

When facility leaders say they lack confidence in accessing critical building information, the real problem is not documentation availability, but rather identity fragmentation.

Low confidence in complete and accessible records is exactly what should be expected in an industry where every renovation, ownership change, and software migration creates another chance for the connective thread between a physical asset and its history to snap.

Over the past several decades, the built environment has methodically standardised layer after layer of how infrastructure gets built and managed. CAD standardised design. BIM standardised information. GIS standardised location. IFC standardised interoperability. Digital twins standardised representation. AI is now beginning to standardise intelligence.

What none of those layers ever standardised is identity: a persistent, portable reference that follows a piece of infrastructure across every one of those systems and throughout its lifecycle. Each new platform generation has improved how information about an asset is captured, but none has solved the problem of what happens to that information once the platform, the vendor, or the employee who understood it moves on.

A digital twin cannot remain continuous if the identity of the physical asset it represents is not continuous.

That distinction is worth stating plainly. Interoperability tells systems how to exchange information. Identity tells systems what they are exchanging information about. The industry has spent 50 years solving the first problem while leaving the second essentially unaddressed.

The Pfizer conversion is useful not because documentation failed at a single point, but because continuity failed across an entire history of changes, and continuity ultimately depends on identity.

The more productive question isn’t how thoroughly infrastructure gets documented. It’s why so little of it carries a persistent identity across ownership changes, renovations, and software migrations. That question spans BIM, GIS, digital twins, AI, insurance, construction, and government alike: every industry exchanges data about buildings without a shared way to identify what it describes.

The built world has standardized nearly every way information is created, exchanged, and analyzed. The next standard will not be another data format. It will be persistent identity.

• Trevor Vick is the CEO of UMIP, Inc. and the founder of the Global Infrastructure Identity Standard (GIIS).

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