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In several past lifetimes, once the office space was rented, I was responsible for setting up the space. I took care of everything from mapping out the size of the individual offices, figuring out HVAC requirements, phone systems and lighting. As the project manager I was responsible for dealing with building facility personnel at one end and the contractors at the other.

While there were certain things that we had control over, there were others that were completely handled by facilities. It is always important to remember that unless you are a large enough enterprise to own your own building, you will always have to deal with facilities since they are responsible for the safety and the smooth running of the building.

In the same manner that we are seeing homes become smarter through the use of technology, offices are going through similar changes. While most people believe that smart technology is basically designed to make our lives easier, the real benefits come from the fact that smart homes can be more cost efficient while at the same time providing safety features.

One area in an office space that has always been hard to control is lighting. There have been several times when I had to work over the weekend and several buildings where facilities controlled the lights and, without written requests only the emergency lights were on. So now that we are moving toward a smart office where commercial spaces have light fixtures with various sensors, who becomes responsible for them?

Tom Pincince, who is president and CEO of Digital Lumens, made the following remarks, “Facilities managers are going to bring a lot of this stuff in largely without the CIO and IT managers involved. Remember BYOD? Now we’re going to have BYOB, or bring your own building and the IT managers are going to have to deal with it. Right now there is a divide. The facilities guys look at IT as technocrats and the CIOs don’t want to deal with the physicality of the building automation.”

It seems to me that while hosted cloud services are taking some of the strain of having to maintain the type of data center that I used to be responsible for, mobile technology has added a lot to the plate of the IT department. So my question is why would there be a turf war between facilities and IT?

Well, according to Eric Rondolat, Global CEO of Philips (News - Alert) Lighting, “Light is not just light anymore. They are systems with location and sensors and intelligence. We need to develop full architectures for the light sources, and the software and on the marketing and sales side of the equation we must also make sure we are equipped with the type of people who can drive those types of enterprise sales.”

With Rondolat’s comments in mind, it seems that Philips’ sales teams are having more conversations with chief experience officers and IT departments rather than facilities managers. When you consider the fact that the sensors on the light fixtures communication through the use of software it does seem to make sense that IT would be in control.

Of course, another aspect to consider is that facilities will be required to have someone on their staff 100 percent familiar with both the hardware and software end of all the new smart lighting systems. It would seem to me that the turf war is not who will maintain all the new smart systems that we will shortly see in office buildings, but rather who does not have to maintain them.