The Challenge

Organizations are faced with many challenges today. In addition to pressures to operate more efficiently and provide higher quality services, a perfect storm is forming as maintenance backlogs from buildings which date back to World War II are meeting with the requirement to develop strategies which address today's economic climate alongside rising energy costs and climate change. While adopting a strategy for sustainability is no longer optional, it also presents a genuine opportunity for competitive advantage.

"Sustainability" has been defined as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. Today's forward-thinking organizations seek to understand and balance the 4 key pillars of sustainability ---

              E C O N O M I C   |   E N E R G Y   |    E N V I R O N M E N T A L    |    S O C I A L

These pillars represent the contexts in which organizations operate – and with knowledge they can tell, on an ongoing and predictable basis, how these factors will impact their economic and natural resources, and those of the future.

Investments in renewable energy, commitments to operational changes and decisions to pursue new strategic business initiatives are made based on having access to quality information and tools to understand the real impacts of those changes. Knowledge, based on access to real and current information, is key to successful risk management and to maximizing the change opportunities.

From an energy, water, solid waste, and climate change perspective, the built environment represents a huge opportunity for society to achieve a sustainable future. But while business processes have improved recently related to facility operations and the sustainable design of facilities, the one glaring failure dating back to the post World War II building boom is inadequate governance processes for asset management. Deferred maintenance liabilities measured in trillions of dollars, global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions from ever-increasing energy demand, and resulting energy shortages that cause social and economic hardships are all problems that can only be dealt with by changing the way that organizations govern their investments in facilities and infrastructure. Clearly, to have a sustainable natural environment, first we must have a sustainable built environment.

By implementing a Sustainable Performance Governance Solution, organizations possess the required knowledge to make strategic, analytical, and operational decisions – More importantly perhaps, though, they have a roadmap for the ongoing sustainability of their built environment.