What is a facility manager to do?

How is the world of facilities changing?  What role does a facility manager play in total operations?  What do you do when the CEO starts calling you to his office and starts to talk about IT, the CIO, cost, compliance, etc?  You know what is wrong in operations but there never seems to be the right amount of money.  Why all this attention now?

The role of the facility is changing, whether you are at a university, a large enterprise, or a government facility.  Energy is becoming a pressing cost that is out of control.  Buildings are aging faster than they should.  Activists are talking about green and sustainability.

In the 90's a major transformation occurred in information technology.  The Gartner Group started to educate the market to think about IT in the context of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).  TCO changed the nature of IT from being a cost center to being a strategic weapon in a competitive world.  Energy, maintenance, supply chain management, compliance, and homeland security introduce a new market pressure on facilities that requires the facility manager to start thinking about their role as 1) a cost center or 2) a strategic weapon on reducing operation costs and improving operational quality.

It is now time for the concept of TCO to be applied to the facility.