Integrated Facilities Management is evolving towards smarter, energy efficient outcomes

For most organisations, lighting is treated as background infrastructure, fixtures installed once, maintained reactively, and replaced only when it fails. In my experience across the portfolios we manage, it rarely enters the strategic conversation about building performance, energy efficiency or occupant experience, despite being one of the most consistent and controllable sources of operational energy spend in any building.

That is starting to change as asset owners look for ways to maximise the value of their operations.

Rethinking what owning lighting means
Facilities management has, for decades, been built around asset ownership: acquire the equipment, maintain it, depreciate it, replace it. Lighting has followed the same pattern. 

What if, instead of owning lighting infrastructure, organisations simply bought the outcome they actually wanted: consistent light quality, lower energy consumption, dependable performance with design, installation, maintenance and upgrades bundled into a single accountable service?

This is the thinking behind Light-as-a-Service (LaaS), and it points to a broader repositioning of lighting within Integrated Facilities Management (IFM) that every asset owner should be considering.

Why this matters to Integrated Facilities Management now
Three trends are converging to make this shift urgent rather than theoretical.
Rising energy costs are putting sustained pressure on operating budgets. Lighting, often left running on legacy systems well past its optimal lifecycle, is consistently one of the easiest — and most overlooked: targets for improvement.
ESG and sustainability commitments increasingly demand measurable, reportable progress rather than stated intent. Connected lighting systems generate exactly the kind of granular usage data that supports credible ESG reporting. This is becoming a priority for clients.

IFM itself is maturing. The mandate has moved well beyond simply keeping buildings operational. Today, it's about delivering measurable performance and experience outcomes across every building system and lighting should be no exception.

Lighting can no longer sit outside the core IFM conversation as a standalone, transactional line item. It belongs inside the broader asset lifecycle strategy that is planned, monitored and optimised alongside HVAC, security and workplace services, not managed separately from them. Lighting design, installation, maintenance and optimisation has to be managed as an integrated offering, giving asset owners and occupiers a genuine lifecycle-based alternative to the traditional CapEx-heavy approach to lighting, and a clearer path toward their energy and ESG targets. This is a natural extension of where Integrated Facilities Management needs to go: fewer fragmented vendor relationships, more integrated, outcome-based solutions that give asset owners real visibility and control over performance.

The Bigger Picture
As energy costs rise and sustainability expectations tighten, the organisations that treat lighting as a strategic lever rather than a fixed cost to be managed passively will be far better positioned to control both.

It starts with a simple reframe, one in which every asset owner and facilities leader should ask what lighting outcomes need to be achieved and the corresponding infrastructure that needs to be invested in.