Today, we have no lack of data for our buildings. The issue that we need to tackle as our world becomes more and more saturated with data is avoiding information overload and instead curating important data that is actionable in the real world – and in our case – for real world facility teams who happen to have a mountain of tasks on their to do lists already.
Notification Overload
Some analytics companies take the approach that people want instantaneous notifications – an email or a text for every single fault or opportunity. This is valuable in critical environments but is often overkill for most facilities. False flags can easily slip through to users and will only wind up annoying tenants to the point where they turn the notifications off, missing key information.
When people receive too many notifications, most default to ignoring them all-together.
Dashboard Approach
Another approach is a dashboard, often containing key high-level information. Dashboards often have great aesthetic appeal but only add real value when teams have the ability to dive deeper into certain pieces of information to obtain more detail. These are great for facility teams who are able to use dashboards to obtain more granular information, executive level audiences, or the general public, say in a lobby as well.
Handheld Reports
Some groups like reports that they can hold in their hands. This is good for field staff or anyone who doesn’t have time to be on a computer, but a con is that the information might be out of date as soon as you print it, and adding value to the data in terms of explanation or context is time consuming and expensive. A lot of teams who are getting paid to produce reports also feel the need to make them ‘heavier’ or add commentary to things that might not warrant it.
Prioritizing issues to avoid information overload
At CopperTree, our approach is to rollup the information in daily and weekly views, prioritized by a potential savings cost. The goal is to focus on the big fish that are actionable now. You can tag issues you intend to look into. You probably can’t get to everything every day or week, so if the issue goes away, it won’t be on tomorrow or next weeks list. You don’t have to look at every item. There’s no need to tackle all of them. The idea is that there’s always something to look into and that can change week in and week out. If an issue is persisting, it will be there tomorrow or next week.
Breaking down a mountain of data into actionable segments allows users to tackle issues at their pace, and fix the most important problems first.