Introduction

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In his book Property and the Office Economy,[2] Rob Harris describes a shift in corporate attitudes whereby offices are: ‘no longer perceived to be a passive, inert by-product of doing business, but rather an active component of business survival … being increasingly available as accommodation rather than property ’  However, ‘Real estate is only one aspect of an organisation’s business infrastructure.  The other key elements are people and technology.  The three areas are increasingly interdependent, and changes in one area can have a dramatic impact on the others … As this trend continues to bring greater complexity to the management of organisations, so it will become more critical to have joined up thinking in key resource areas …’ leading to the goal of ‘integrated business resource management’.

In local and central government, similar pressures upon the property function have brought about the introduction of an ‘asset management’ approach, described by the Institute of Asset Management as: ‘the optimum way of managing assets to achieve a desired and sustainable outcome.’ [3] A report by Andrew Howarth (National School of Government) for OGC in 2006 states: ‘Whilst specialist knowledge or technical competency is very important to the everyday running of property and estates, asset management … implies a wider understanding of the part property can play in the delivery of the organisation’s  primary objectives.  There are, therefore, differences between the property management view of assets and the asset management view of property.’

The distinctions between property and asset management are described on the opposite page, but the apparent polarity between one approach (centred on short-term, tangible inputs) and the other (focused on long-term, often intangible outcomes) does not mean that the two methods are opposed or separate.  Property management delivers the wider objectives of asset management and is in turn embedded within the overall business context, interacting with other management systems.  In other words, asset management mediates between the delivery of the organisation’s strategic objectives - the ‘there-and-then’ - and the day-to-day management of buildings and facilities - the ‘here-and-now’. 

Rob Harris notes that a shift towards an integrated approach will increase the ‘complexity’ of the whole system.  Managed in isolation to other parts of the business, buildings and facilities comprise a complicated, but nevertheless understandable process, which shows linear, predictable behaviours.  However, when other processes and people are taken into account, the system becomes complex and far more difficult to control, often appearing to acquire a life of its own and developing a stubborn resistance to change.  Ashby’s Law (inset) implies that the complexity of any management system must be at least as great as the diversity of the situation it is seeking to control.   This rule, explained on page 7, provides a common-sense justification for the key proposal of this paper: a specification for managing property assets should be sufficiently simple to encourage widespread use, but it should not be so simplistic that it cannot deal with the complexity that emerges when property is considered as an integrated business resource.

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