Outsourcing Dilemma: The Search for Competitiveness, The

Facilities management

Third party management of property and other physical assets has a long history and was certainly well established before the outsourcing of IT became popular in the late 1970s and 1980s. As much of the original IT outsourcing was largely based on physical assets like mainframes, it was natural for many people to talk in terms of facilities management or FM when describing IT outsourcing. Gradually, however, the term FM became confined, as far as IT is concerned, to situations where legacy hardware and systems are maintained by third party organizations in a run down mode.

Facilities management as it relates to property continues to expand and in many Western countries third party specialists manage the vast majority of ...