Over the past 20 years, the built environment has made significant progress in digitising information
Drawings, specifications, O&M manuals, asset registers, models and certificates are now routinely created and exchanged digitally. Standards have matured. Tools have improved. Organisations capture information far better than they did.
Despite that progress, many of the people who own, operate and invest in buildings still face the same problem. They cannot find the information they need to make decisions about safety, compliance, performance and long-term investment. That challenge lands on contractors too, in the form of slower close-out, retention held against information completeness, disputes over what good looks like, and projects that get pulled back months after practical completion.
This is not an information problem. It is a discipline problem.
When information exists but confidence does not
The pattern appears across government, healthcare, commercial property and critical infrastructure. Information is created during design and construction, often to a high standard and in large volumes. At handover, it transfers to the operations team. Then change happens. Equipment is replaced. Layouts are altered. Inspections and upgrades take place. Over time, information becomes fragmented or outdated unless there is a clear approach to maintaining it.
Confidence in that information declines. Organisations begin to work around it. Teams double-check records, commission repeat surveys and recreate asset registers. Decisions are made cautiously. Extra cost and risk get absorbed.
Glider calls the mismatch between the information organisations hold and the information they can confidently act on the performance gap. It shows up in three common conditions. Information that was structured during delivery but lost at handover. Information that exists but has degraded through years of uncoordinated change. Information that was never created in a structured form at all. Most estates contain buildings in all three.
The limits of digitisation alone
The industry has been trying to address this. BIM, digital handover processes, CAFM systems and common data environments have all contributed. Standards such as ISO 19650 have clarified expectations around information delivery.
But digitisation has focused on the creation and storage of information, not on how that information performs over time. Tools tend to be optimised for a single phase. Design tools support design. Construction systems support delivery. Operational systems support day-to-day running. What is missing is a consistent way of connecting information across these phases and governing it once responsibility changes.
Defining asset intelligence
Asset intelligence is the discipline that addresses that gap. It describes how information is defined, produced, governed and used so that those responsible for buildings can act with confidence across the full lifecycle.
Two things make it new. First, it is whole lifecycle. Parts of the work will look familiar to people who manage information within a specific stage but no existing discipline spans design, delivery, handover and operation end to end.
Second, it describes the how, not just the what. Standards and regulation describe what good looks like. Asset intelligence describes how organisations build the capability to deliver it and sustain it as buildings change.
In practice, it brings together five functions that already exist in fragments across the industry. Clear information requirements, defined around how assets will be operated rather than what is easiest to deliver at handover. Structured capture, whether on new projects during design and construction, on existing estates where it was never captured in a structured form, or as buildings change over time. Governance, with ownership, validation and change control. Delivery, ensuring information is accessible to the people and systems that rely on it. And active use, where information is applied to improve safety, efficiency, sustainability and long-term performance.
Individually, these functions are familiar. The shift is in treating them as a connected discipline, applied consistently over time.
What this means for contractors
Handover sits at the centre of the performance gap, and contractors sit at the centre of handover. Information is produced under pressure, across multiple suppliers, to varying standards. Late validation and rework are common. Once the project team disbands, there is limited capacity to maintain information to the same level.
When handover is treated as an endpoint, degradation is almost inevitable. Asset intelligence reframes handover as the starting point for operational use. Information is created with its future role in mind and governed through change.
That matters to contractors commercially. Cleaner handover reduces rework, speeds up sign-off, releases retention earlier and reduces exposure to disputes over information quality long after practical completion.
Progressive confidence, not perfection
Most organisations do not have perfect information, and few could achieve it quickly even if they wanted to. Asset intelligence works on the principle of progressive confidence. Organisations start by understanding their current information condition. They identify where risk is highest and where confidence matters most. They address those areas first and build capability incrementally over time. That keeps the discipline practical rather than theoretical and allows it to be applied pragmatically across complex estates, rather than as an all-or-nothing transformation.
Why this matters now
Expectations on building owners and operators are rising. Safety requirements are clearer. Sustainability targets demand long-term evidence. Assets are more complex and expensive to operate. Without a disciplined approach to information, decisions become slower, more conservative and more costly.
Those that adopt asset intelligence early gain a clearer view of their estates. Information becomes comparable across assets and projects. Portfolio insight improves. Decisions are better informed and more consistent. For contractors, working with customers who are adopting asset intelligence means clearer requirements, less ambiguity at handover and more durable commercial relationships beyond practical completion.
A necessary next step
Information management has enabled better capture and sharing of data. Asset intelligence is the next step. It turns that information into something that can be relied on across the whole life of a building.
The industry has invested heavily in digitisation. The task now is the discipline that allows that information to support better outcomes over the long lives of our built assets.
*Please note, this is a commercial profile.
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