Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise, has spent years watching property owners hand operational technology decisions to people who were never trained for them. According to Douglas, it is one of the most consistent and expensive blind spots in the industry.
Information Technology (IT) manages organizational infrastructure: servers, email, identity management, firewall policy, directory services. Operational Technology (OT) runs the building itself: HVAC systems, lighting controllers, access control, parking management, leak detection sensors, elevators, and the data those systems generate. The problem is that when ownership groups ask who is responsible for the technology, IT managers raise their hand because low voltage wiring looks like their domain. Property managers raise their hand because the building is their responsibility. Asset managers stay quiet. Nobody actually owns OT, and that vacuum is where inefficiency lives.
When no one inside the organization owns OT, vendors do. A general contractor finishes a building and hands technology decisions to a property manager who is already stretched thin. The property manager buys something that solves one problem without fitting into any broader strategy. Over time, a typical quarter-million square foot building ends up with a dozen or more disconnected systems, multiple redundant networks, and data scattered across vendor platforms the owner cannot access.
“They have strategies to build properties, to buy properties, to sell properties, to lease up, to increase rent roll,” Douglas said. “But they often just ignore the digital. So the vendors run the roost.” The consequence is not just inefficiency; it is a loss of data. Every one of those systems generates operational data that belongs to the property owner. When vendors manage the system, they hold the data.
Douglas is direct: property managers, IT managers, and asset managers are capable people, but they are being asked to do things outside their training. “We are asking the wrong people to do the right tasks,” he said. “A property manager’s job is to take care of tenants and lease up the building. Not to manage networks they never designed and probably cannot document.” OT management requires a digital strategy, a digital architect, and someone accountable for the data. The Peak Property Performance framework gives owners a structured process for auditing, connecting systems, collecting data, and improving performance.
The clearest way to understand the cost of ignoring OT is to look at what managed OT produces: utility savings from knowing when energy is consumed, lower insurance rates from documented maintenance, and improved tenant experience. When OT is unmanaged, lights stay on in empty buildings, water damage goes undetected, and systems run on default settings for years. “You lose control of your expenses,” Douglas said. “And you lose the data you should be able to use to operate more efficiently and drive more revenue.”
The data is already there, produced by systems the owner paid for. The question is whether anyone is in a position to use it. That is not an IT problem or a property management problem. It is a strategy problem, and it starts with recognizing that OT is its own discipline.
