Facilities @ Management

3.6 On the Brink of Change

Mark P. Mobach

Introduction

These are very exciting times for the Facility Management (FM) profession. Contemporary developments create unprecedented opportunities for FM, allow it to have positive impact on organizations and their workforce globally, and to contribute to global challenges. These opportunities also require new perspectives on FM and the built environment, different value propositions and investments, and the advancement of evidence-based design in FM. In short, the time for action is now. However, before reflecting on these opportunities we first need to better understand the nature of FM, also in its historical and contemporary contexts.

The Nature of FM

In 2014, together with Keith Alexander and others we argued that FM as a management discipline serves the primary process of organizations and is being associated with a broad spectrum of supportive activities varying from the design and management of buildings and technical systems to services as cleaning, security, and catering (Mobach et al. 2014). At the times, within the European Facility Management Network (EuroFM) it was generally accepted that the core value of FM was the “integration of people, process, and place.” In 2002, FM had been redefined into space, infrastructure, people, and organization. It is pre-supposed here that infrastructure refers to the physical environment of organizations, such as buildings, interior, and technological devices. Infrastructure encapsulates ...