Facilities 25 years

Citation

Bröchner, J. (2007), "Facilities 25 years", Facilities, Vol. 25 No. 11/12. https://doi.org/10.1108/f.2007.06925kaf.004

Facilities 25 years

When the first issue of Facilities appeared in 1982, it was at the height of the Gutenberg era. Electronic media were just around the corner, but faxes, personal computers and mobile phones were still costly, clumsy and unusual. Web tools belonged to the imagination of cyberspace science fiction writers, and so did the contours of the office of the future in the new economy. For publishers of academic journals, the transition from fear of an electronic nemesis to a happy convergence of traditional and digital media has taken place during the 25 years that we now celebrate.

During the first dozen years, there was the steady flow across the Atlantic of fads and tools: benchmarking, balanced scorecards, quality assurance, total quality management and business process reengineering. In retrospect these approaches can be seen as consequences of the new way of working with personal computers in networks, a development which when combined with financial deregulation is also under suspicion of toppling many of the huge conglomerates in industry. As part of the process, there emerged around 1990 a clear view of core activities and support activities in firms, as a rationale for outsourcing or internal reorganization. And what could be a better example of support activities than facilities management?

It is in this historical context that a journal called Facilities suddenly appeared to have a particularly relevant name. One of the words that defy translation into Swedish, German, Japanese, Hungarian – the list can be made much longer – is facility. Unlike English, these languages lack a single handy word crystallising the idea of a physical environment that is supportive. Nevertheless, interest in facilities management has spread globally since the 1990s.

For Facilities as a journal, there remains if nothing else a geographical challenge: encouraging contributors and readers from a wider range of countries than today. The outlook is good, but it will take time to win over the European continent and other dark spots on the map. Each country has its own innovation system for services such as facilities management; a well-developed system includes collaboration between universities, firms and government funding bodies. There should also be fierce competition in the system, at least partly based on high quality publishing of research findings in journals aimed at an international readership. Inexorably, a growing familiarity with the English language, an increasing numbers of students world-wide who learn to write structured papers and international student exchange will transform firms and industries, even those who thought they were protected from the outside world. Just a final warning to our younger readers: in 2032, you shall swallow your facilitipedia as a very costly pill, and it is all in Chinese.

Jan BröchnerChalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden