Facilities management in government is nothing new. The U.S. government owned and managed buildings and assets well before Thomas Jefferson signed his name to the Declaration of Independence. However, today’s facilities managers have a resource that Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers could never have imagined: cloud computing. Imagine how much more efficient Jefferson could have been if he’d had the power to manage his Virginia farm remotely while serving in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
To understand the benefits that cloud computing brings to facilities management, GovLoop talked with Steve Beard, Senior Principal of Global Enterprise Asset Management for software maker Infor.
It might surprise citizens to know that the federal government owns, leases, or manages more than 275,000 buildings around the globe. Those facilities have an annual property operating budget of $30 billion.
“The government needs a viable solution that will help them commission, track, monitor, maintain, and retire those facilities and other assets,” said Beard. “Additionally, the solutions need to be secure, reliable, and technologically current. Those are all value propositions of the cloud.”
For Beard, the pairing of facilities management and proven cloud technologies makes perfect sense: “Facilities management applications like Infor’s Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) suite delivered as a preconfigured deployment in the cloud work because they allow facility directors and their teams to access best-of-breed, commercial off-the-shelf solutions, along with cloud-based data storage and processing power, which increases efficiencies.”
Revolutionizing Gov Facilities will help you better understand the process and the benefits of cloud computing and facilities management, and will address:
- An overview of the cloud and facilities management
- The top benefits of adding cloud to facilities management
- Government’s biggest cloud hurdles
- How enterprise asset management is transforming the business of government
- The future of government facilities management
The public sector is under increasing pressure to deliver results while cutting facilities management costs. Cloud adoption is no longer an if, but a when: It’s now viewed as a given when it comes to planning for the future.
