Purpose Current facility management (FM) practices are inefficient and ineffective, partially because of missing information and communication issues. Information and communications technologies (ICT) are asserted to provide a promising solution for managing and operating facilities. However, the impact of ICT applications on current FM practices needs to be validated and the perception of FM professionals on ICT-based FM needs to be understood. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the impacts and the perception of ICT application on FM practice and further develop an ICT-based integrated framework for smart FM practices. Design/methodology/approach To achieve the objective, the research starts with reviewing several promising ICT for FM, including building information modeling, geographic information systems, unmanned aerial vehicle and augmented reality. On this basis, a conceptional framework was synthesized in consideration of the benefits of each technology. A survey questionnaire to FM professionals was conducted to evaluate the proposed framework and identify the challenges of adopting ICT in the FM industry. Furthermore, return on investment and strength, weakness, opportunities and threats analysis have been used in this paper as evaluation methods for ICT industry adoption. Findings The survey results are validated by FM professionals for the future engagement of the integrated ICT applications. Also, the proposed framework can assist the decision-makers to have comprehensive information about facilities and systematize the communication among stakeholders. Originality/value This research provides an integrated framework for smart FM to improve decision-making, capitalizing on the ICT applications. Apart from this, the study sheds light on future research endeavors for other ICT applications.

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Data collection enabled by existing FMM systems lacks 1) the top-down information solicitation on facility conditions, such as crowdsourcing task division, and 2) geo-referenced occupant feedback. Mobile crowdsourcing has great potential to improve current FMM practice, especially in terms of timely data collection. In this context, this paper explores the feasibility of mobile crowdsourcing for FMM data collection and highlights the associated opportunities and challenges. A survey is carried out on a university campus in order to gain an understanding of the human, data, system, geospatial, and automation characteristics of mobile crowdsourcing for FMM data collection on post-secondary campuses. The survey results are analyzed to reveal the challenges and recommendations for mobile crowdsourcing for user-centered FMM. A conceptual framework is proposed to apply mobile crowdsourcing for FMM. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by synthesizing the challenges, opportunities, and a framework of mobile crowdsourcing-based data collection for FMM.