Nabeel Mahmood Provides Insight on Bridging the Communications Gap Between IT, FM, and C-Suite Executives

By Robert Lindsey

A mission-critical consultant and "Global CXO," Nabeel Mahmood is a noted speaker at the Critical Facilities Summit, September 24th through 25th, at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas. Mahmood will be participating in a panel discussion, "Power Couples: Making the Most of the FM-IT Relationship," on September 24th. We recently spoke with Mahmood about the need for a unified approach between facilities managers and IT professionals.

Critical Facilities Summit: What do you think are the main causes of disputes between FM and IT teams?
Nabeel Mahmood: We often find silos at the organization level where different players have conflicting priorities, and don't understand each other's goals and limitations. Typically, facilities managers are looking at the resources they have available in terms of space, power, and cooling capacity. But IT managers are looking at how quickly they can deploy new applications, or improve the user experience on their existing applications. Meanwhile, the C-suite executives are looking at dollars, and coordinating with IT on how quickly they can turn applications into revenue and profits.

This leads to potential conflicts between the three groups. For example, IT wants to install 24 1U servers or six more blade servers. They see that the data center is half-empty, and wonder why it takes FM so long to do an IT expansion. They don't understand the technical aspects that FM has to deal with — such as resource availably, load balancing, power quality, power distribution, infrastructure redundancy, uptime, and airflow management — in order to support the infrastructure and give the IT team the extra computing resources they need.

CFS: Do you see lack of communication between the different players as being the major factor in these conflicts?
Mahmood: Absolutely! In many organizations, C-suite sees application deployment as a revenue strength, but they usually want to deploy new applications faster than what their FM team can support. The IT team is on board with C-suite, but often they're not communicating down the food chain to their peers in the facilities group: "We're rolling out these applications in six months. So we're going to need this much computing power, this much infrastructure power, and this much cooling."

At the same time, many FM teams are not utilizing all the real-time collaborative tools and resources that they could be using to track operational data in their mission-critical environments. It's difficult for the facilities group to keep up with the "Information Now" culture that we've created in the past decade. Many FM teams are still using spreadsheets as a means to track critical infrastructure metrics, which means they're often using data that is out-of-date.

CFS: What types of technology tools do you think would help to bridge the communications gap between FM, IT, and C-suite executives?
Mahmood: We need to develop FM applications that provide real-time data about facilities operations, while providing each of the business units with a "single pane of glass" view of available resources, in their own language. For example, if the IT team decides they will need X number of petabytes to make their six-month deadline for the next software or application release, this "single pane of glass" tool should tell them that X number of petabytes will require X number of kW in computing power, which will require X number of dollars in budget.

Also, the FM application should provide the different teams with real-time data about available resources. For example, if the current energy utilization level in a mission-critical environment is, let's say, 15%, that means you have about 85% available in your energy stack. In this example, the FM application should be able to determine how many petabytes of computing power can be created using that available energy. This lets the IT people know if it's possible for FM to create the number of petabytes they need, given their current facilities resources.

CFS: You will be participating in a panel discussion, "Power Couples: Making the Most of the FM-IT Relationship," at Critical Facilities Summit. What is the biggest takeaway that attendees will receive from attending this discussion?
Mahmood: The biggest takeaways that attendees will receive are:

• To bridge the communication gap between FM, IT, and C-Suite executives, we need to create applications that provide each business team with a "single pane of glass" view of their facility resources in their own language.
• We need to develop and standardize Data Center/ Infrastructure utilization metrics that can be understood simply across any business segment, and can provide comparable metrics between budget dollars, computing power, and resource utilization.
• We also need to develop unified business strategies that require business unit leaders (FM, IT, OPS) to develop collaborative solutions.
• Facilities managers need to adopt AI, Machine Learning, and IoT technologies that will give them real-time data about mission-critical operations and availability of resources. Our FM teams should leverage the same "Information Now!" technologies that our mission-critical infrastructures are supporting today.

To hear more from Nabeel Mahmood and other presenters, join us at the Critical Facilities Summit on September 24-25 at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas. For full agenda details, visit www.CriticalFacilitiesSummit.com..