by Brianna Crandall — October 7, 2016 — The fifth and final white book from global facilities services provider ISS and Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies (CIFS) explores the trends and drivers revolutionizing service management, a critical competitive parameter for most organizations today. The report provides a model for developing a service delivery system and workforce that focus on high-quality, personalized user experiences, creates a service culture that engages end-users, and establishes a continuously increasing focus on service excellence.
Delivering good service consistently will grow more difficult as markets become increasingly interconnected, industries converge, and end-users — along with the people who serve them — adapt to a new and more connected working environment, says ISS. These changes will put new demands on how services are designed, managed and delivered, particularly in facilities management (FM) and corporate real estate.
Peter Ankerstjerne, head of Group Marketing at ISS, commented:
Many of the good old service management principles around employee engagement, purpose, training and people development still apply. But through our research we have found that the future will challenge us much more in terms of increased user-centricity, technology application, service-on-demand, and new standards of work.
The research was collected by the Copenhagen Institute of Futures Studies (CIFS) and ISS. It consists of a meta-study of trends shaping the future of service management with a specific focus on facilities management; a global survey of 1,495 FM experts and service professionals conducted by ISS, CIFS, IFMA, and CoreNet Global; and a series of in-depth interviews with 12 subject matter experts in fields of service design, technology, and FM.
The report concludes that the future facilities manager will be a manager of user experiences and transformations, and the successful FM service providers will be those who master service management — and helps to create workplaces that are places of shared experiences just as much as they are environments where work is performed. This requires that service providers look beyond traditional strategies to innovative solutions and unusual partnerships as part of their focus on developing sharply defined service strategies that are grounded in ever-increasing user needs.
ISS 2020 Vision: Future of Service Management, available for download from the ISS Web site, is the fifth and final white book in the ISS 2020 Vision series. It extends the scope of the four previous ISS 2020 Vision studies: Scenarios for the Future of the Global Facility Management Industry (2011), New Ways of Working: The Workplace of the Future (2013), Future of Public Sector Outsourcing (2014) and Future of Outsourcing and Perspectives for Facility Management (2016).
