Estates teams across higher education, healthcare, local government and the wider public sector are sitting on enormous volumes of information.
Decades of project records, maintenance histories, asset registers, compliance documents and operational data is spread across dozens of systems, stored in formats that do not talk to each other, and produced to standards that varied from project to project and team to team. The data exists. The problem is that it cannot easily be found, cannot be compared consistently, and cannot be used confidently to support future decisions.
This is not primarily a technology problem. It is an organisational one. And addressing it requires a fundamentally different approach to how estates teams think about information management. Not as a back-office function, but as the foundation on which operational performance, regulatory compliance and long-term asset strategy are built.
It’s a challenge that UCL (University College London) Amodal and Asite discussed recently during Digital Construction Week.
Why estates information has become a board-level issue
For many years, information management was viewed as an operational concern. Important, certainly, but largely delegated to project teams, facilities management functions and specialist consultants. That is changing.
Today, estates information increasingly sits at the intersection of organisational risk, operational performance, sustainability, compliance and investment planning. Decisions worth millions of pounds are made on the basis of information held within estates systems. Decisions around maintenance prioritisation, capital investment, space utilisation, decarbonisation strategies, statutory compliance and building safety all depend on the quality of the underlying information.
For universities in particular, the estate is no longer simply a collection of buildings. It is a strategic asset that supports research, teaching, student experience, commercial partnerships and institutional reputation.
When information cannot be trusted, every one of those outcomes becomes harder to achieve.
The challenge for senior leadership is therefore not whether information management matters. It is understanding how to create the organisational conditions that allow information to become a strategic asset rather than an operational burden.
The scale of the challenge is easy to underestimate
Large, complex estates are not uniform environments. A major university campus, such as UCL’s, encompass hundreds of buildings across multiple sites, ranging from Victorian listed structures to contemporary research facilities. The Estates team run over 90 separate applications to manage its operations.
The challenge becomes even more significant when viewed through the lens of UCL’s wider ambition.
As one of the world’s leading universities, operating across a diverse and continually evolving estate, UCL must support a unique combination of teaching spaces, laboratories, healthcare environments, cultural assets, student facilities and commercial partnerships. Each generates information. Each consumes information. Each depends on information being accurate, accessible and trusted.
The objective is not simply to consolidate systems. It is to create a connected information ecosystem capable of supporting decision-making across an estate that will continue evolving for decades.
That distinction is important. Digital transformation is not about technology replacement. It is about improving the quality and speed of decisions.
They have to maintain hundreds of thousands of individual building and MEP assets, with an annual capital delivery programme running into hundreds of millions of pounds alongside a substantial maintenance backlog.
“Technology alone does not create digital maturity. Digital maturity is everybody understanding how they play a role in the delivery of information management.” – Benjamin Bizzell
At that scale, the web of systems, teams, suppliers and data sources is genuinely complex. No single intervention resolves it. What is required is a multi-year, multi-workstream programme coordinated through an agile delivery framework, involving hundreds of internal and external stakeholders. The organisations that underestimate this complexity tend to invest in platforms before they have the governance or capability to use them effectively. The result is a new system layered on top of existing problems.
The starting point, therefore, is understanding what information the organisation actually needs to operate effectively, understanding where that information currently lives and in what condition, and understanding the gap between the two. Only once that baseline is established does it become possible to build a credible roadmap for change.
Where most large estates get stuck
The patterns that hold large estates back from effective information management are remarkably consistent across sectors and organisation types.
The most common is treating information as an artefact rather than an asset. Projects are designed and delivered with a focus on the physical outcome. The information produced along the way, such as design records, commissioning data, asset information, compliance evidence, is captured to satisfy milestones rather than to serve operational needs. At handover, what arrives is a set of documents rather than a set of data. It can be filed. It cannot be queried, compared or connected to the systems that operational teams actually use.
The second pattern is fragmented sources of truth. In most large organisations, different teams are working from different versions of the same information. The capital delivery team has one view of the asset register. The FM team has another. The compliance team has a third. None of them is wrong exactly, but none of them is complete either. Decisions get made on the basis of whichever source is most accessible, rather than the most accurate. Over time, that compounds.
The third pattern is governance without traction. Information management strategies exist in most large organisations. Standards are referenced. Policies are published. But those frameworks rarely shape what actually happens on individual projects or within operational teams. It’s treated as a tick-box exercise. Governance that is not embedded in procurement, not checked at milestones and not reinforced through leadership tends to produce documents rather than change.
The fourth, and increasingly urgent, pattern is AI ambition on weak foundations. The conversation around smart estates, digital twins and AI-powered asset management is accelerating. The appeal is understandable: better insights, faster decisions, more efficient operations. But every one of those capabilities depends entirely on the quality, structure and completeness of the data feeding it. Deploying AI tools on top of fragmented, inconsistent, poorly governed information does not solve the underlying problem. It amplifies it.
Information debt is the hidden liability
Financial debt appears on balance sheets. Information debt rarely does. Yet many organisations are carrying decades of accumulated information debt in the form of inconsistent asset records, duplicate data, undocumented assumptions, disconnected systems and missing operational knowledge.
- Every time information is recreated because it cannot be found.
- Every time an asset survey is commissioned because nobody trusts the existing data.
- Every time a maintenance team attends site without the information required to resolve an issue. The organisation pays interest on that debt.
The cumulative impact is often invisible because it is distributed across multiple budgets, multiple teams and multiple years. Yet collectively it can represent a significant operational inefficiency.
One of the most valuable outcomes of a digital estates programme is not simply creating better information going forward. It is systematically reducing the information debt accumulated over many years.
“Embedding a data-first culture in a large organisation does not happen overnight. It requires honest leadership, dedicated skills and training, and time. It is the cumulative result of many small incremental improvements, conversations and shared objectives.” Joe Jones, UCL
Where do most digital transformation programmes go wrong?
One of the most common failure modes in large-scale digital transformation is deploying technology before the organisation is ready to use it. A common data environment (CDE) that nobody trusts. An asset management system populated with data nobody has validated. A digital twin built on information that does not reflect the building as it exists now. They are familiar outcomes for estates teams that have invested in platforms before addressing the governance, standards and cultural foundations within the organisation itself.
The principle that consistently distinguishes successful transformation programmes from unsuccessful ones is deliberate sequencing: people, then process, then technology. They have a clear understanding that technology is the enabler of a good information environment, not the creator of one.
In practice, this means starting with a clear understanding of operational outcomes: what decisions does this organisation need to make, and what information does it need to make them confidently? From there, it becomes possible to define information requirements that are genuinely grounded in operational need rather than copied from standards documents. And from there, it becomes possible to specify what a technology platform needs to deliver to meet those needs.
Making requirements real: from strategy to delivery
One of the practical challenges in large estates transformation is the gap between high-level information strategy and the specific, deliverable requirements that contractors and suppliers can act on. ISO 19650 provides a framework. But a framework is not a specification. Translating ‘we need decision-grade asset information’ into a set of requirements that a design team, a main contractor and a subcontractor can all understand, agree to and be held against is harder work than most organisations anticipate.
The approach that tends to work starts from the asset and works outward. What does this operational team need to do with this asset? What information do they need to do that? Once those operational outcomes are defined, it becomes possible to build out the information requirements incrementally: organisational information requirements, down to asset information requirements, down to project information requirements and exchange information requirements. Each layer is grounded in the one above it, so the entire chain of requirements connects back to a real operational need.
“If you ask ten people what information management is, you will get ten different answers. Each person, depending on their role, has a different concept of what they need. Building a base understanding of the employer’s requirements — simple goals first, then building out — is how you get an organisation aligned.” Benjamin Bizzell
For complex estates with high-risk buildings, this process also needs to address specific regulatory requirements. Building safety legislation demands a more rigorous, traceable approach so thoserequirements need to be built into the information framework from the outset, not retrofitted at the end of a capital programme when the relevant teams have moved on.
Two documents that prove particularly valuable in this context are:
- a clear CDE Requirement, setting out how information is to be structured, named and managed through the project lifecycle,
- and a specific Handover Requirement that addresses O&M information, health and safety documentation and CDM obligations.
Neither is new as a concept. What is less common is having them written to a standard specific enough to be enforceable and practical enough to be followed.
“For decades, we have been putting data into CDEs. The question now is how we get the CDE to give us data back — better insights, better decisions, driven by the information we have already invested in capturing.” Josh Myers, Asite
The CDE question: a single source of truth that people actually use
The CDE has become one of the most discussed and least resolved questions in estates information management. In principle, the proposition is straightforward: one place where all project and asset information is held, accessible to everyone who needs it, governed consistently. In practice, getting there from a starting point of 90-plus legacy systems, multiple terabytes of data in varying formats and a supply chain accustomed to working in different ways requires careful, sustained work.
The migration challenge alone is substantial. Data held across shared drives, legacy CDEs, external supplier systems and departmental platforms needs to be assessed, cleansed, aligned to current standards and transferred into the new environment. Some of that can be done through automated API-driven approaches. Some requires manual cleansing. All of it requires decisions about what is worth keeping, what needs updating and what can be retired. That process takes time, and it surfaces problems that nobody knew existed.
The configurability of the platform matters enormously at this stage. A CDE that can be tailored to reflect the organisation’s specific folder structures, workflows, forms and role-based access requirements is far more likely to achieve genuine adoption than one that requires the organisation to adapt to the platform’s processes. The goal is a system that different users – from project managers to compliance teams, from facilities managers to, in a university context, students – can navigate intuitively and trust in the information it provides.
The CDE selected today will also need to evolve as requirements change, standards develop and as AI capability becomes embedded in everyday workflows. The question estates teams are rightly asking is not just what does this system do now, but what does it look like in five, ten or fifteen years? Long-term partnerships with technology providers are increasingly the model that supports sustainable transformation.
This longer-term view is becoming increasingly important as AI adoption accelerates across the built environment.
Many organisations are understandably excited by the prospect of AI-assisted project and asset information management, automated compliance checking, predictive maintenance and natural-language access to operational information.
However, AI does not remove the need for good information management. It increases it.
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally dependent upon the quality of the information available to it. Poorly structured data, inconsistent naming conventions and incomplete asset records do not become more valuable when processed through AI. They become faster-moving sources of error.
The organisations that derive the greatest value from AI over the next decade are unlikely to be those with the most advanced algorithms. They will be those with the strongest information foundations.
Bridging the gap between capital delivery and operational management
One of the least resolved challenges in estates information management is the gap between the systems used to deliver capital projects and the systems used to manage the assets in operation. These two worlds have historically operated largely independently, with information produced during design and construction rarely landing in a form that operational teams can use directly.
The gap between a project CDE and an integrated workplace management system (IWMS) is not just a technical integration challenge. It is a data quality and governance challenge. The information in the CDE was structured to support project delivery. The IWMS needs information structured to support maintenance planning, compliance management, space management and energy performance monitoring. Those are different structures, different naming conventions and often different levels of granularity.
Getting this right requires defining, before the project begins, exactly what data the IWMS needs to receive at handover, in what format, and to what standard. It requires that specification to be built into the contractor’s information requirements, checked during delivery and validated before practical completion. And it requires someone to take explicit ownership of the transition from the capital delivery team to the operational estate.
“We need to understand what data they (the CDE and the IWMS) share, how we maintain a single source of compliance data, ensure the FM supply chain has the information they need to do their jobs, and make sure the systems talk to each other effectively. That is part of the operational strategy, to streamline the systems.” Joe Jones
For organisations with large operational platforms that might be processing tens or hundreds of thousands of maintenance tickets annually, the efficiency of that system depends on the quality of the information feeding it. An IWMS populated with incomplete, inconsistently named or poorly structured asset data does not just create administrative friction. It affects response times, maintenance costs, compliance reporting and ultimately the experience of the people who live and work in the estate.
“Confidence in information must be built progressively. Buildings do not become smarter because we install technology. They become smarter when organisations trust and use the information behind them.” Joe Jones
The digital campus opportunity
The term “digital estate” is often used to describe connected buildings, integrated systems and improved information flows. The ambition for organisations such as UCL is broader.
A truly digital campus is an environment where information moves seamlessly between people, processes and technologies, enabling better decisions at every level of the organisation. Students experience better environments. Researchers gain improved access to facilities and resources. Operational teams spend less time searching for information and more time acting upon it. Leadership teams gain greater visibility of performance, risk and investment priorities.
In this sense, information management becomes an enabler of institutional outcomes rather than simply an estates function.
The buildings remain important. But the value increasingly comes from understanding how those buildings support the people who use them.
Stakeholder engagement and cultural change: the work that takes longest
Of all the components of a successful information management transformation, the one that is most consistently underestimated is the cultural change required to make it stick. It happens through many small conversations, many small decisions and many small demonstrations that the new approach is worth the effort.
In large, complex organisations, change fatigue is a real risk. The same teams are repeatedly asked to adjust their working practices for one initiative while managing the demands of another. The same leadership time is required for digital transformation alongside the operational demands of running a large estate. Managing that carefully by prioritising engagement and demonstrating early wins, is as important as any technical decision.
Effective stakeholder engagement in this context means more than communication. It means meeting people where they are: understanding their specific role, their specific information needs and their specific concerns about change. It means translating the language of information management — which is often technical and unfamiliar — into terms that resonate with each group. And it means building a sense of shared ownership in the outcome, so that the people being asked to change their behaviour feel like participants in the programme rather than subjects of it.
Senior leadership commitment is essential and not sufficient on its own. Top-down buy-in unlocks governance decisions and funding. But the work of embedding a data-first culture happens at every level of the organisation, through the daily decisions of project managers, facilities teams, procurement managers and data administrators. That work is incremental, cumulative and slow. There is no shortcut to it.
Digital maturity is measured in behaviours
One misconception that persists within digital transformation programmes is the belief that maturity can be purchased. It cannot.
Technology can be purchased. Software can be procured. Platforms can be implemented. Digital maturity emerges when people consistently behave differently because better information is available to them.
The organisations making the greatest progress are rarely those with the largest technology budgets. More often, they are the organisations that have succeeded in aligning leadership, governance, capabilityand culture around a shared vision for information.
That is considerably harder work than implementing a system. It is also considerably more valuable.
Confidence in information must be built progressively
There is a temptation in large transformation programmes to set ambitious end-state visions and measure progress against them. The risk is that the gap between the current state and the target state becomes demoralising, and that incremental progress gets overlooked in favour of waiting for a moment of completion that never quite arrives.
The more productive framing is progressive confidence: a steady, cumulative increase in the reliability and usefulness of the information the organisation holds and acts on. Each project that delivers information to the required standard. Each dataset successfully migrated and validated. Each team that begins making decisions from a shared, trusted source rather than from the version of the spreadsheet on their own drive. These are not partial failures. They are the building blocks of genuine transformation.
This progressive approach also applies to the ambition itself. AI-powered asset management, predictive maintenance and fully integrated digital estate operations are achievable goals. But they are achievable because the foundations have been built: the information requirements defined, the governance embedded, the data quality validated and the culture shifted. The technology is the final layer, not the first.
8 Steps to Good Information Management
For estates teams working through these challenges, a clear picture is emerging of the conditions that support successful transformation:
- Strategic ambition backed by genuine senior leadership commitment — not as a statement of intent but as active sponsorship that unlocks governance decisions, funding and organisational priority
- A maturity baseline established before any technology procurement, so the organisation understands where it is starting from and what the realistic next steps are
- Information requirements defined from operational outcomes, not inherited from standards documents or contract templates
- Deliberate sequencing of people, process and technology — with governance and cultural foundations in place before platform deployment
- A common data environment selected for configurability and long-term adaptability, not just current feature set
- A planned, resourced transition between project delivery systems and operational management systems, with clear ownership of the handover point
- Stakeholder engagement that meets people in their own language and builds shared ownership of the outcome
- Progressive measurement of confidence in information quality, not just milestone delivery against a project plan
The opportunity in the complexity
Large, complex estates are difficult environments in which to manage information well.
They contain decades of history, multiple generations of technology, changing organisational priorities and increasingly demanding regulatory expectations. Yet these same characteristics create the greatest opportunities for transformation.
The conversation at Digital Construction Week reinforced a simple but important principle.
The organisations that will benefit most from AI, digital twins, predictive analytics and intelligent campus operations are not necessarily those investing first in technology. They are the organisations investing first in information.
- Information requirements.
- Information governance.
- Information quality.
- Information confidence.
These are the foundations upon which every future capability will be built.
For UCL and other organisations pursuing ambitious digital estates programmes, the objective is not simply to create a smarter estate. It is to create an environment where trusted information enables better decisions, better experiences, better operational outcomes and ultimately better organisational performance.
The technology will continue to evolve. The value of trusted information will not
Many thanks to our DCW panelists:
Joe Jones, Head of Data and Digital Estates, UCL
Benjamin Bizzell, Associate Director, Amodal
Josh Myers, Director of Major Accounts, Asite.
Many thanks to Asite for permission to use their photographs.
Contact us today
Discover how Amodal can help you deliver safer, smarter, and more compliant projects and assets.