Editorial
What does it mean to be an expert in facilities management? This idea seems to elude us, because by its very nature facilities management is a non-specialist profession. There is certainly a toolkit that practitioners use and this toolkit is becoming ever more varied and sophisticated. But more often than not this toolkit has tools in it that have been plundered from other disciplines.
The question we therefore need to ask is how we can improve this toolkit? How can research be trawled and translated into a form that can be made relevant to the practitioner? This is the challenge that Facilities as an academic journal attempts to meet. For, after all, research without relevance to the practitioner is devoid of value.
Sometimes the toolkit seems to look a little outdated. Techniques like benchmarking, quality assurance, post occupancy evaluation and risk analysis all appear to need reinvention. Key developments like the algorithm for creating stacking plans, and the introduction of the SERVQUAL method of quality evaluation presented milestones in the development of the facilities management toolkit. But it seems that the development of the facilities management profession has made us too "inward looking". We have adopted and exhaustively applied the same techniques. We have created research groups and bodies of knowledge that serve to reinforce the image of the facilities management profession. But in so doing, we have closed our eyes to what is going on around us. Much of the interesting research work that is of interest to the facilities manager has not gone under the banner of "facilities management". For example, research work undertaken by NASA in the 1970s, looking at the psychological problem of living in confined spaces in space stations, gave rise to many insights that were of value to the hospitality industry seeking to increase the apparent spaciousness of the standard hotel room. The use of particular colour schemes, room layout and mirrors all provided psychological tricks that increased an occupant's sense of room spaciousness. Other examples include work undertaken by the US and British navy regarding optimal layouts in submarines, where the consequences of poor planning were felt throughout the life of the vessel.
Out of all this I suppose I am suggesting that an "outward looking"research agenda is vital to the success of facilities management. In our attempt to define its uniqueness and our insecurities about its own identity we have tried to develop our own exclusive toolkit. To this end, we have also created our own research centres. But the really interesting things are out there somewhere. We should not be afraid to plunder from other disciplines. To reflect this "open" approach, Facilities will be encouraging authors from other disciplines to contribute papers to the journal. For many such areas the authors may not even be aware of the significance of their work to facilities management. For that reason I intend to enlist the support of the Editorial Advisory Board to identify these authors. Over the coming months we can "expect the unexpected" in Facilities!
Edward Finch
