Facilities and IT: The Similarities
This is the third in our series on brokering energy management collaboration between the Facilities and IT departments. You can see the first article here: Energy Management: Building a Bridge between Facilities and IT. The second article can be found here: Facilities and IT: Learning to Speak the Language.
We have covered the differences in both the focus areas and the terminology barriers between Facilities and IT. Now it’s time to take a look at the similarities between the two departments and the collaboration needed to successfully implement an enterprise-wide energy management solution. As with all other collaborative relationships, it is easiest to build a team effort on common ground.
Both Facilities and IT provide critical services to the rest of the organization and, although providing very different resources, each department works in a similar way. Often times, projects developed in other departments do not involve IT as an important part of the implementation until the last minute, leaving them scrambling for resources in the 11th hour. Along the same vein, Facilities is only involved by IT when they run out of available power and the situation is critical. With data centers running out of space and power at a rapid rate, energy management has become a growing challenge for IT departments.
Because energy management solutions run on the network, Facilities may see it as an IT product. Because Facilities realize the budgetary relief of energy management, IT may view it as a Facilities product. However, it’s important to remember that energy management is not department specific. From facilities management devices ( HVAC and lighting) on the Facilities’ side, and computing devices (PCs, monitors, switches, routers, servers, VoIP phones, printers) on the IT side, enterprise energy management spans the entire organization.
Ensuring there is enough capacity to meet the demands of the IT organization for years to come is an effort that must be undertaken by both departments, as a team. Because managing energy efficiency is critical to IT’s ability to maintain SLAs, as well as Facilities’ ability to plan for and deliver sufficient power to the enterprise as a whole, neither department can afford to pass up the opportunity to collaborate in the implementation of an enterprise energy solution.
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