Making Information Based Decisions – Webinar

Recently I had the pleasure of delivering my first webinar for Facility Managers.

The webinar was hosted by Planon Software and dealt with using information for decision making. If you missed it, you can watch and listen to it on-demand for free here.

In addition to my segment, Planon’s Director of Product Strategy, Erik Jaspers, also gave some great examples of how to use information from an FM System in Facility Management.

I’ve talked before about the importance of having decisions here on my blog, and it’s been part of several of my Facility Management workshops and seminars as well as a section in my book “Managing Facilities & Real Estate.”

This topic is also part of my upcoming seminar titled “Get Out Of The Back Room: Keys to Developing — and Growing — Your FM Career” at the Total Facility Live conference in Sydney, Australia July, 2012.

In the webinar, which was just enough time for an overview, I discussed why information is needed for effective decision making and how what we often have isn’t information at all, it’s simply data.

I talked about the key reason for having information – visibility into your operations. This gives you insight you need to understand what works, what doesn’t and what you can do to improve results using facts, not guesswork. That includes finding root causes and bottlenecks so you can know what to change to improve results. It also gives you facts and data for selling your department, service and your business cases to your boss.

I outlined the best way to get information and the types and uses of information from various FM Systems, including maintenance management, help desk, occupancy management, real estate and leasing, asset management, etc. These are usually represented by CMMS, CAFM, IWMS, etc. either in an integrated or stand-alone, specialized software.

Part of the issue is actually using FM Systems to provide information. It’s not just about getting reports. it’s about relating information, looking at trends, looking at performance and root cause and analysing data to provide decision making information.

While a relatively high proportion of the participants indicated that they already had a system of some sort, the challenge even for them is to get and use information for decision making in their Facility Management responsibilities. I find that often systems are implemented as a task and process based solution and not enough effort is made to get, analyze and use information that the systems can provide. It should be part of the business requirements phase, implementation phase and then followed up after the system is in place to make sure you are getting what you need from your system.

Based on the success of this webinar and the number of interested participants, I plan on doing more webinars on Facility Management topics, both with others, like this one with Planon Software, and independently. In the mean time, if you have comments or suggestions, including topics, please let me know. If you want to hear about upcoming webinars, please sign-up for our newsletter to be kept up-to-date.

In the mean time, be sure to watch this webinar here.