Essence of Facilities Management

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FACILITIES Vol 8/No 8/August 1990 ANALYSIS The essence of facilities management REAL FACILITIES MANAGEMENT IS NOT ABOUT CONSTRUCTION, REAL ESTATE, BUILDING OPERATIONS, MAINTENANCE OR OFFICE SERVICES. IT IS ABOUT FACILITY PLANNING - WHERE BUILDING DESIGN MEETS BUSINESS OBJECTIVES. THIS, ARGUES TONY THOMSON, IS THE KEY TO GREATER PROFESSIONAL MATURITY. T he first decade of facilities management has nearly ended - it can be considered to have officially begun in the US with the formation of the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) and the Facilities Management Group (FMI) in 1980. The UK can claim to have officially participated in this decade of development by way of comment and opinion - the first issue of Facilities was published in the UK in 1983 and through professional development - the Association of Facilities Managers (AFM) and the Institute of Administrative Management (IAM/FMG) were both formed in the UK in 1985. Despite all these initiatives where is the profession today? In my own opinion, still on very thin ice. Facilities management offers organisations many solutions for improving business performance, yet too many organisations still consider it to be a solution looking for a problem. They fail to recognise areas where real value can be added and instead adopt piecemeal approaches that reap no long term rewards and often offer little short term gain. I recognise that such comments are negative and do little for the cause of facilities management, but I shall attempt to qualify them here. DESCRIBING FACILITIES MANAGEMENT Take any five facilities managers, ask them to describe what facilities management is and you will be fortunate to find two similar descriptions. Most definitions will be reduced to lists of a particular manager's responsibilities. To me this is rather like asking the

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