In FM, we talk a lot about how to automate building maintenance. At the moment, we rely on humans to notice many of our problems as they use or pass through the space. There are some pretty big flaws with this. You notice something but don't note it down immediately... A person in the area might uncover a problem but the message never gets to you... Why? Because we are forgetful. Because we see it as out of our responsibility. Or because we simply don't know the right channel.
Things that go awry when someone has been unreliable or in other words, human.
What happens when we cut out the middleman and let the building itself tell us what's wrong? This is the premise behind smart cities. The building and the infrastructure is smart enough to tell you itself that there's something wrong. Think of it like the engine temperature gauge in your car: you don't need to go and take measurements to make sure it's within acceptable limits; it does it for you. When it's too high, a dashboard light comes on and you can choose when to act. Smart cities goes a bit further: not only do systems notify of faults but they also keep tabs on routine maintenance and schedule themselves. So the warning of a fault gets automatically processed with the planned work and reshuffled and you are left with a nicely organised, prioritised set of works to be done without all the headache of scheduling and the things that go awry when someone has been unreliable or in other words, human.
You want your lovely fully automated system to supplement your current solution instead of replace it.
Automation can remove the headaches of the human error and lighten our planning load. Sounds magic, doesn't it? However, the difference between your car engine and the building you maintain is that the engine only interacts with one person. A car has one driver while your building is full of people. So you want your lovely fully automated system to supplement your current solution instead of replace it. There are three reasons for that:
- Your automated solution is not perfect either. After all, it was built by people and we already know people make mistakes.
- The technology can fail us: sensors break, communication protocols get disrupted...
- The people in the space need to know who to turn to with questions or when something goes wrong.
So while the manufacturers and construction companies improve their technology and provide us with better data and less error prone solutions, we need to be looking at our community as well. Our community is us, our staff and the people who inhabit the spaces we maintain. It's often the latter who get forgotten. We talk more about that in our previous posts about who are your customers and what's wrong with our helpdesks. Many companies who provide public services post updates on problems they are fixing using twitter and other social media channels. We don't want to broadcast to the world but to our community. So take a look at your information flow and who might be marginalised or cut out of a conversation that pertains to them. And how you might give them a sense of ownership so that it turns into a maintenance collaboration instead of delegation.
The dream of an automated, robotic space that takes care of itself is still beyond us, especially financially. You can do anything with an infinite amount of money, but you're better off putting that money to better use – automate what gives you the best value for money, and rely on your relationship with the ever-versatile living users of your space to fill all the gaps in your technology. The smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology points out that big high-tech systems are better suited to keeping themselves running rather than keeping the space suited to the people in it.
A fully automated space works best when there's no one who enjoys it, or even better, no one in it. That's not the sort of place you want to have. What you want is a system that works best when people are hustling and bustling about the space and being a part of it. As long as there is someone who wants to decorate their cubicle, put up a poster or have a plant, they want to be be engaged in their space, so take advantage of that.