FMJ Facilities Management magazine providing industry-specific intelligence to FM and property professionals
Harry Dodd-Noble, Chief Product Officer, askporter
Facilities management is at an important moment. A new report from askporter, ‘Overcoming staff shortages and quality gaps with technology’, reveals a worrying issue that is undermining technology adoption and creating inefficiencies.
The research found that 75 per cent of FMs are experiencing an operational disconnect that interrupts technology integration. This crisis is not due to a lack of solutions, but a failure of existing building systems to communicate, creating costs and frustration for both staff and end-users.
Historically focused on reactive maintenance and cost control, the FM industry is moving to a strategic approach, yet the complexity of current systems makes this transition near-impossible.
FM teams can operate with four to six different siloed systems, including CAFM, IoT, and ERP. This lack of streamlining has severe consequences:
Compliance Risk: 44 per cent of professionals report that half or less of their compliance tasks are traced and automated within their systems, exposing businesses to legal, commercial, and reputational risks.
Reactive Operations: 73 per cent of teams are forced into reactive problem-solving weekly, limiting the time they can spend on proactive maintenance.
Talent Crisis: The chaotic, manual environment makes it difficult to retain skilled talent, as high-value technicians are forced to perform dull, administrative data entries.
When data is fragmented across systems, it creates significant compliance blind spots. Important details, like the full maintenance history of a critical fire alarm, can be siloed and inaccessible, posing danger to residents and exposing building owners to substantial regulatory and reputational risk.
This friction is a design error, the result of platforms trying to solve too many jobs with a single tool, becoming “technically wide but functionally shallow”.
The classic comparison is the sofa-bed. It can serve both purposes but rarely excels at either. In FM technology, this plays out when a system forces an office worker or tenant to raise an issue through a generic form. That poor interaction is not a user error; it is a design error. The product is doing too many jobs and performing none of them particularly well.
My product philosophy leans heavily towards modularity and depth of capability. FM teams don’t need one giant platform; they need to assemble the right set of specialist tools for their specific building, people and processes.
Specialist, dedicated tools are designed to gather information from end-users with far less friction and in the way that suits them. These can be customised to adapt to local processes, leading to faster operational workflows that work for the businesses that use it.
The core principle is to use technology to eliminate the repetitive, predictable, or manual actions that add operational drag. This informs every design decision, from conversation flows to how tasks are pushed into the FM’s systems.
If FM teams are to have the freedom to choose their best-in-class stack, then interoperability is critical. Data must move cleanly and predictably between systems without expensive bespoke work.
This is why FMs should ensure their system can easily connect with others using open APIs and proven integration methods. Crucially, it should work alongside other specialised systems, filling in the gaps, rather than attempting to replace them all.
The 75 per cent operational disconnect is not just an inconvenience; it is a strategic threat leading to spiralling costs, accelerated asset decay, and a failure to meet modern ESG targets. The future of maintenance is unified data.
The Webinar held by FMJ and askporter: How to overcome the comms gap in FM with AI and tech tools is available to download.
This webinar which took place on January 29th provides a valuable overview of the main findings of the report by askporter followed by a panel discussion by FM thought leaders on practical, strategic solutions that can help close this communications gap.
You can view the webinar here.
