Most building facility and operations departments have a wealth of information but inadequate means to organize it. To manage the wide spectrum of operations and facility information properly, managers must understand the term database and building an operations manual in its most basic sense.

Great care must be exercised in designing and selecting management tools that enable managers to find what they are looking for—even when they are rushed, cannot remember where the information is, do not remember its name, and do not know how it works. The management tool for these tasks is a simple database to provide access to needed information and a manual, either in electronic or physical form, to provide information on how to use each element and how the entire facility works. Before you design a database and a manual, however, it is important to understand the relationship between information and data.

Alex Zylberglait provides commercial real estate investment advisory as well as research, estate planning, asset allocation, valuation, financing, special assets services, transaction advisory and commercial property acquisition and disposition services.