And now for a post from my professional life.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how facilities software implementation is changing.
For years, the work centered on implementing a single platform end‑to‑end. To be clear, this approach can still deliver real value. Organizations managing their real estate and facilities workflows with clipboards and spreadsheets will see powerful results when they (carefully) implement a comprehensive central platform.
There are not as many organizations that look like this today as there were a decade ago. Lately the clients I work with are more likely to be mature in some areas and need help in others. They want to figure out how to work AI into their processes and analytics, how to connect their ERP systems to maintenance and real estate without alienating their employees, and how to integrate GIS, content management, identity management, and other solutions they already know and trust into something coherent. So my role is shifting from an implementer to something broader: product-managing a cohesive facilities intelligence ecosystem built from many moving parts.
Some components already live in production at the client’s site. Others come bundled inside traditional IWMS suites. Though “point solution” has been a dirty word in my industry for years, the most impactful pieces are often tools that solve one problem exceptionally well. Telling a different story–one you may have heard, about simplification through consolidation, or “tearing down silos”–is probably misleading the client and sending them down a path that is more likely to result in costly failure than success.
The challenge, or, better put, the opportunity, is designing how these pieces fit together. It’s no longer about “rolling out a system.” It is about curating a connected experience that delivers results quickly, minimizes friction, and proves its value to end‑users without heavy change management or months of training. The product should be sticky, like the best smartphone app. It should reveal itself, surfacing the right affordances and the right data in different ways to those who need it. It should be attractive and minimal. It should get out of the way and just work.
Implementing facilities software, then, is equal parts product development, systems engineering, process engineering, and project management, aimed at delivering a product that will exist for as long as a piece of heavy equipment; manage millions or billions of dollars in assets, including critical life-safety systems; integrate into the daily life of hundreds or thousands of people; and make up a significant part of the ongoing budget of the customer. It’s an awesome responsibility, an exciting challenge, and a thoroughly engrossing problem.
I wont solve the problem tonight, but I know that the future of IWMS isn’t monolithic. It is modular, integrated, intelligence‑driven, and deeply user‑centered. I’ve got some more posts in mind that build on this theme. Stay tuned.
