Intellectual capital: future competitive advantage for facility management

In the office sector, facility management serves two divergent concerns: the needs of the customer as the facility owner/investor and the needs of the customer as the facility user. This places FM in a potentially powerful position. It should exploit its intellectual capital, realising the unique strategic value of the FM knowledge base, linking, as it does, the knowledge of physical facility performance with the knowledge of business objectives, operations and support services. The generic knowledge chain that links these two divergent areas of concern is described, highlighting the critical importance of the business brief, the operational brief and the design brief in the future exploitation of the facility knowledge base.