Commercial real estate owners are making a costly mistake by lumping building operational technology (OT) under the same umbrella as information technology (IT), according to Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise. This oversight is leading to inefficiencies, lost data, and missed savings opportunities.
Douglas, who has spent years observing the industry, explains that IT and OT serve fundamentally different purposes. IT manages organizational infrastructure—servers, email, identity management, and firewall policy. OT, on the other hand, controls building systems: HVAC, lighting, access control, elevators, leak detection, and parking management. While IT connects employees to tools and protects data, OT makes a building function efficiently—or wastefully.
The problem arises when ownership groups ask who is responsible for technology. IT managers raise their hands because low-voltage wiring looks like their domain. Property managers step up because the building is their responsibility. Asset managers stay quiet, focused on financial reports. The result is that no one truly owns OT, creating a vacuum where inefficiency thrives.
“IT is very skilled at running organizational systems, financials, security, and access,” Douglas said. “But operational technology is completely different. Most ownership groups have no idea these two categories exist.”
When no one internally owns OT, vendors fill the gap. A general contractor hands technology decisions to a property manager who is already stretched thin managing leases. The property manager, needing quick solutions, buys a system at a trade show that solves one problem but doesn't fit a broader strategy. Over time, a typical quarter-million-square-foot building accumulates a dozen disconnected systems, redundant networks, and data locked in vendor platforms the owner cannot access.
“They have strategies to build, buy, sell, lease up, and increase rent roll,” Douglas said. “But they often ignore the digital. So vendors run the roost.”
The consequence is not just inefficiency—it's a loss of data. Every OT system generates operational data that belongs to the property owner. When vendors manage the system, they hold the data, and the owner pays for a service without receiving the intelligence it could produce.
Douglas emphasizes that property managers, IT managers, and asset managers are capable people, but they are being asked to do tasks 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.”
To address this, OpticWise developed the Peak Property Performance framework, which provides a structured process for auditing existing systems, connecting the right ones, collecting owned data, and using it to improve performance and profitability.
The costs of ignoring OT are clear. Utility savings come from knowing when and how energy is consumed. Insurance rates drop when owners can document maintenance history. Tenant experience improves when problems are caught early. Without managed OT, 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 positioned to use it. This is not an IT problem or a property management problem—it is a strategic problem. Recognizing OT as its own discipline is the first step toward reclaiming efficiency and profitability.
