Editorial

Citation

Finch, E. (2002), "Editorial", Facilities, Vol. 20 No. 13/14. https://doi.org/10.1108/f.2002.06920maa.001

Editorial

What's in a word? Quite a lot when you realise that during the Soviet period there was no term for "real estate" as observed by Liias in his paper "Developing an Estonian national facilities management standard". Many psychologists would argue that we cannot even begin to perceive or understand a subject until we can attribute a word to it. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why academics continually seek to define and redefine words and terms. For countries such as Estonia the problem is doubly difficult as the terminology must in some way have some resemblance to international standards that are typically formulated in the English language. So when we look at the challenges of standardisation and terminology confronting such countries, the problem is not simply translation. The first question is whether the concept exists in the first place.

The advent of information technology will undoubtedly have a major impact in the formulation of standards – indeed its use relies on them. Computer software relies on the formulation of unambiguous concepts and relationships. Whether it be the structured databases used for maintenance logs or semi-structured eXtensible Markup Files (XML) increasingly being used for applications such as instruction manuals, agreement of concepts is paramount.

The modern debate about the nature of facilities management inevitably has a computing perspective. Computer science provides a formal framework for categorising things (ontology) and their relationship with others.

Cultural issues and historical legacies will continue to affect the way that we perceive our everyday work. Facilities management is no more immune to these influences than any other discipline: indeed diversity might be considered a positive attribute. But for many multi-national property owners and international service providers this heterogeneity presents nothing but problems.

So as we see the global deployment of facilities management software we increasingly see the imposition of standards – albeit in a subliminal form. Helpdesk systems, asset inventories, programming software all establish a modus operandi. Even when such software uses country specific terminology, a one-to-one mapping with the English equivalent inevitably occurs where no such relationship existed before. In terms of interoperability this process is inevitable, but is there a danger of losing something here? In just the same way as the food producers are narrowing the genetic pool in pursuit of the perfect crop yield, are we in danger of losing something from our own pool of resources. Have we more to learn from the less dominant countries which may have a trick or two to teach us?

Edward Finch