When two steel columns buckled on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer headquarters in Manhattan in July, the building safety industry watched a familiar sequence unfold. If you manage, own or operate a building, this is the kind of incident that could just as easily have been yours.
Investigators scrambled to reconstruct what happened to the 37 story tower, then mid conversion from office space into more than 1,600 apartments. Reporting from industry news sources noted that engineers were cautioned against assuming the visible damage marked the full extent of the problem, since structural elements are interconnected. Early accounts pointed toward a missing steel reinforcement plate that should have appeared in the engineering plans but never reached the columns, according to engineers cited by The Real Deal.
It would be easy to read this as a documentation failure, something a better filing system could have prevented. That framing undersells the problem. The tower did not lose its documentation. It lost records continuity. Every renovation, code cycle and material change was tied to whatever system or individual happened to be tracking it, and when that link broke, so did the thread of the asset’s history, the same thread you rely on every time you approve a renovation or answer to a regulator.
What your building is missing is not another document repository. It is a persistent identity connecting every record, inspection, permit, renovation, owner, engineer and software platform to the same physical asset over its entire lifecycle.
This matters well beyond one incident, because even a disciplined document management program can run into this failure mode. A document repository can tell you what records exist on file. It cannot tell you what has happened to your asset across its operating life.
A recent industry analysis of facility continuity found that as veteran facility managers retire or move on, decades of undocumented building knowledge often leave with them, since that knowledge frequently lives in someone’s head rather than in a system. The same analysis cited IFMA projections that more than 45% of facility management professionals worldwide will retire within the next decade, testing whether your institutional memory survives, or walks out the door with your most experienced people. Nothing in your systems persistently follows the asset. The record lives with the software, the vendor or the employee, never with the building.
This is where the stakes sharpen. After a failure, structural engineers, investigators and insurers need a reliable, continuous chain of custody for every material change, traceable to who made it, when and under what code cycle, not just a folder of drawings. A binder handed off at turnover cannot provide that, and neither can a server only your last facilities director knew how to navigate.
The same need extends well beyond structural engineering. Fire departments, emergency agencies, FEMA, insurance adjusters, building officials and search and rescue teams all depend on the same continuous history of what your building is, what it can support and what has changed.
What emergency response actually requires is closer to a VIN, a persistent identifier that every contractor, engineer, permitting office and software platform can reference over decades, regardless of who owns the data or which system created it. Imagine investigating an aircraft whose maintenance records changed numbering systems every time ownership changed. That would be unacceptable in aviation, yet you may already accept it as normal for your building.
Viewed this way, recent survey findings from ARC Facilities on facility leader confidence are not really measuring documentation quality. They are measuring identity fragmentation, the same fragmentation you may already sense in your own operation. The survey found that many facility leaders describe only partial confidence in accessing critical building information when it matters most, with one respondent noting that their organization lacks a reliable system, and another describing an ongoing struggle to retain critical knowledge. That is exactly what should be expected in an industry where every renovation, ownership change and software migration creates another chance for the thread between your asset and its history to snap.
Over the past several decades, the built environment has standardized layer after layer of how infrastructure gets built and managed. CAD standardized design, BIM standardized information, GIS standardized location, IFC standardized interoperabilit and digital twins standardized representation. AI is now standardizing intelligence.
What none of those layers ever standardized is identity, a persistent, portable reference that follows your infrastructure across every system and throughout its lifecycle. Each new platform has improved how information about your asset is captured, but none has solved for what happens to that information once the platform, vendor or employee who understood it moves on, leaving you holding the risk. A digital twin cannot remain continuous if the identity of the asset it represents is not. Interoperability tells your systems how to exchange information. Identity tells them what they are exchanging information about, and the industry has spent 50 years perfecting the first problem while leaving the second unaddressed inside your portfolio.
The Pfizer conversion matters not because documentation failed at a single point, but because continuity failed across an entire history of changes, and continuity depends on identity. The more productive question isn’t how thoroughly your infrastructure gets documented. It’s why so little of it carries a persistent identity across ownership changes, renovations and software migrations, a gap that spans BIM, GIS, digital twins, AI, insurance, construction and government alike, since every industry exchanges data about your buildings without a shared way to identify what it describes.
The built world has standardized nearly every way information is created, exchanged and analyzed. The next standard will not be another data format. It will be persistent identity, and the sooner your organization adopts one, the less exposed you will be next time something goes wrong.
Editor’s Note: Trevor Vick is the CEO of UMIP, Inc. and the founder of the Global Infrastructure Identity Standard (GIIS). For more information visit www.umipinc.com.