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 major buildings and business sites. Facilities management specialists now offer a wide range of services including planned maintenance, estate management, landscape management, new building project planning, benchmarking and relocation management.

It is difficult to imagine anything but further growth in facilities management because fashion or trends in other business areas have not, so far, affected its success. For example, in the UK many areas of outsourcing have been given a boost by the government’s policy of privatization. That is certainly not true of facilities management. In mid 1999 it was announced that Trillium, a partnership between Mitie and Goldman Sachs, won the contract to run the 700 buildings belonging to the Department of Social Security. This was the first transfer of UK government properties to the private sector, but other government departments are now showing various levels of interest in the concept.