ABSTRACT
Business managers will continue to overlook the strategic potential of facilities management as a component in the value chain until the terms that facilities managers use for discussing its performance relate more directly to the core business drivers. Meanwhile, the normal approach to facilities management benchmarking-that of focusing on generic, data-driven, quantitative and predominantly facility-oriented measures-places the emphasis on the common denominators of average performance issues. It does not allow the value of facilities management for particular businesses to be differentiated, and it does little to help Facilities Managers relate their performance to the preoccupations of their core business clients. Furthermore, if the hackneyed saying 'what gets measured gets managed' holds, contemporary facilities management performance management may be at best a diversion, and at worst be an obstacle to the realisation of facilities management as a strategic business asset. The use and abuse of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and performance measurement in general have thus to be analysed.
