Why Treating Building Technology Like IT Is Costing Property Owners

Commercial real estate owners are making a costly mistake by treating operational technology the same as information technology, according to Bill Douglas, CEO of OpticWise. The confusion between these two categories of building technology is leading to inefficiency, lost data, and missed opportunities for savings.

Information technology (IT) manages organizational infrastructure like servers, email, and cybersecurity. Operational technology (OT) runs the building itself: HVAC, lighting, access control, elevators, and leak detection. When ownership groups ask who handles technology, IT managers often step forward because low-voltage wiring looks like their domain. Property managers also raise their hands because the building is their responsibility. Asset managers stay quiet, focused on financial reports. The result: nobody truly owns OT, creating a vacuum filled by vendors.

Douglas has observed this pattern across the industry. Without internal ownership, vendors fill the gap. General contractors hand technology decisions to overstretched property managers, who buy point solutions at trade shows without a broader strategy. Over time, a typical 250,000-square-foot building accumulates a dozen disconnected systems, redundant networks, and data scattered across vendor platforms inaccessible to the owner.

“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.” This not only breeds inefficiency but also loss of data. Every system generates operational data that belongs to the owner, but when vendors manage the systems, they hold the data. The owner pays for a service but receives none of the intelligence it produces.

Douglas is direct about the misalignment: “We are asking the wrong people to do the right tasks.” A property manager’s job is tenant relations and leasing, not managing networks they never designed. IT managers, while skilled at organizational systems, lack training in building automation. The solution, he argues, is recognizing OT as a distinct discipline requiring a digital strategy, a digital architect, and accountability for the data it produces. These roles can be outsourced but must exist somewhere.

The Peak Property Performance framework, developed by Douglas and OpticWise founder Drew Hall, provides a structured process for auditing existing systems, connecting them, collecting owned data, and using it to improve profitability. The benefits of managed OT are clear: utility savings from knowing energy consumption patterns, lower insurance rates through documented maintenance history, and better tenant experiences from reliable operations.

When OT is unmanaged, lights stay on in empty buildings, water damage goes undetected until visible, 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 being 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 that starts with recognizing OT as its own discipline with its own return.