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Amidst the complicated nature of the UAE’s facilities management (FM) industry, the need to recalibrate the existing performance measurement (PM) system measures and criteria has been resonating to ensure their ability to capture the FM industry trends and dynamics, thus enhancing organizational excellence. Therefore, this research aimed to propose a specific PM tool to the country’s FM industry to accurately assess performance and establish strategic enhancements.

The study reviewed literature on the available PM systems to gather the available measures, which were presented to a focus group of seven participants, who were purposively selected based on their expertise in FM and PM implementation in the UAE to adjust them and add ones relevant to the UAE’s FM industry.

The focus group conducted various changes, from retaining certain measures and criteria, renaming them to simplify or make them more representative of the industry, ranking them based on their importance to limit their numbers, to finally categorizing them as enablers or results. Consequently, the final proposed tool was composed of nine dimensions with 51 measures as performance enablers and three dimensions with 11 measures as performance results. Seven measures were added by the experts, who highlighted their increasing popularity in the UAE’s FM industry.

Through addressing the critical void in literature, this paper develops a specific PM tool aligning with the intricacy of the UAE’s FM industry, thus providing proactive contribution to the industry’s effective and sustainable growth.

This study aims to leverage the implementation of building information modelling (BIM) in facilities management (FM), and thus the integration of BIM and FM are explored. It looks at identifying the information needed to implement BIM application in FM, to determine the level of implementation of BIMFM as well as to recommend BIMFM application mapping for building life cycle.

This study applied qualitative methodology, upon which a purposive sampling to 16 interviewees were conducted among professionals involved in any BIM, FM, BIMFM projects. Final analysis was conducted using thematical analysis by ATLAS.ti software.

The types of information required to implement BIMFM range from managerial information, commercial information, technical information and all full life cycle data. The implementation of BIMFM is agreed as beneficial, as it builds up efficiency of building performance, able to close gap of loses information, helps to improve FM in terms of data management, mitigates the problems, identifies priority defects and to enhance the FM processes. Respondents also believed that the causes where there is no implementation of BIMFM is in the situations where things are in order and when it becomes very expensive.

This paper has managed to gather the essential elements toward leveraging the implementation of BIMFM in digital construction project which are in the means of information types, the needs of BIMFM implementation and towards the end drawing the BIMFM implementation plan framework that could be used as a reference for the practitioners and industry.

Privacy has been understood as about one’s own information, information that is not one’s own is not typically considered with regards to an individual’s privacy. This paper aims to draw attention to this issue for conceptualizing privacy when one’s privacy is breached by others’ information.

To illustrate the issue that others' information can breach one's own privacy, this paper uses real-world applications of forensic genealogy and recommender systems to motivate the discussion.

In both forensic genealogy and recommender systems, the individual’s privacy is breached by information that is not one’s own. The information that breached one’s privacy, by its nature, is beyond the scope of an individual, which is a phenomenon that has already been captured by emerging discussions about group privacy. This paper further argues that the underlying issue reflected by the examples of forensic genealogy is an extreme case even under the consideration of group privacy. This is because, unlike recommender systems that rely on large amounts of data to make inferences about an individual, forensic genealogy exposes one’s identity by using only one other individual’s information. This paper echoes existing discussions that this peculiar situation where others’ information breaches one’s own privacy reveals the problematic nature of conceptualizing privacy relying only on individualistic assumptions. Moreover, this paper suggests a relational perspective as an alternative for theorizing privacy.

This situation that others’ information breached one’s own privacy calls for an updated understanding of not only privacy but also the relationship between the person and their information. Privacy scholars need to renew their ethical language and vocabularies to properly understand the issue, which recent privacy conceptualizations are already doing (e.g. group privacy).

The present chapter aims to assess how digital transformation impacts current trends in city branding, to analyze the role of digital communication in the branding of selected cities, and to compare the level of exploitation of digital communication for city branding between European and Slovak cities. We conducted empirical research in several phases, and the overall sample consists of 155 cities in Europe and Slovakia. The results of our research showed that European and Slovak cities use to some extent all the investigated tools of digital marketing communication in city branding with a dominant position of social media, both in terms of exploitation and importance for city branding in European and Slovak cities. European cities score significantly better than Slovak cities in all elements of the City Brand Hexagon, as well as in the overall city brand index. Therefore, city branding strategies in the best European cities can serve as a good practice example or inspiration for Slovak cities. Cities with lower rankings and scores on city branding should focus on strengthening their city branding or strengthening their digital communication. The possible trajectory is also the concerted strategy for the branding of the city and its digital communication.

This study applies traditional strategic management concepts to firms operating in digital environments. Specifically, this study examines the role of social media (SM) in the financial performance of entrepreneurial firms and how perceived uniqueness and human capital impact this relationship.

This study analyzes a sample of 797 independent music artists using ordinary least squares regression.

This study finds that SM presence is positively related to SM success and, in turn, that SM success is positively related to financial success. Further, this study finds that perceived uniqueness negatively moderates the SM presence to SM success relationship and that human capital positively moderates the SM success to financial success relationship.

Firms competing in digital environments should limit their perceived uniqueness and increase their human capital in order to maximize the positive benefits of a SM presence.

The UAE is among the fastest-growing facilities management (FM) markets globally. Nevertheless, conclusive evidence on this market is scarce in the literature. Therefore, this paper aims to provide an in-depth insight into the FM market in the UAE.

Fourteen interviewees were purposively selected to provide insight into FM status through their field experiences. A SWOT analysis of their answers held place.

Interviewees revealed that the main trends of FM in the UAE include interests in sustainability, integration of technology, health and safety, outsourcing FM, switching to total facilities management (TFM), and performance management systems use. Besides, the quality of the service in the FM market is driven by the real-estate boom, services sophistication, the increasing awareness of FM and focus on the quality of services. Furthermore, the interviews found that the recruitment of poorly skilled labors can threaten the FM market to meet the allocated budget, misperception of FM, the value of money, the lack of continuous follow-up with recent advancements in technologies and the lack of performance measurement models.

This paper highlights the major trends, drivers and threats of the FM market in the UAE, and the implications of its findings can direct FM organizations and researchers in their practices.

3D steady heat conduction analysis considering heat source is conducted on the fundamental of the fast multipole method (FMM)-accelerated line integration boundary element method (LIBEM).

Due to considering the heat source, domain integral is generated in the traditional heat conduction boundary integral equation (BIE), which will counteract the well-known merit of the BEM, namely, boundary-only discretization. To avoid volume discretization, the enhanced BEM, the LIBEM with dimension reduction property is introduced to transfer the domain integral into line integrals. Besides, owing to the unsatisfactory performance of the LIBEM when it comes to large-scale structures requiring massive computation, the FMM-accelerated LIBEM (FM-LIBEM) is proposed to improve the computation efficiency further.

Assuming N and M are the numbers of nodes and integral lines, respectively, the FM-LIBEM can reduce the time complexity from O(NM) to about O(N+ M), and a full discussion and verification of the advantage are done based on numerical examples under heat conduction.

(1) The LIBEM is applied to 3D heat conduction analysis with heat source. (2) The domain integrals can be transformed into boundary integrals with straight line integrals by the LIM. (3) A FM-LIBEM is proposed and can reduce the time complexity from O(NM) to O(N+ M). (4) The FM-LIBEM with high computational efficiency is exerted to solve 3D heat conduction analysis with heat source in massive computation successfully.

Facilities management (FM) activities affect citizens’ health and safety, long-term urban environmental sustainability and the relationships between the built and natural environments of cities. This study aims to comprehend the status of smart FM tools application, how they are used to improve the delivery of FM services and the barriers to their implementation.

To investigate the current smart solutions that leverage the quality of FM service, a case study based on the FM practice in Hong Kong was carried out. The case study was conducted in two phases of data acquisition based on a qualitative research methodology. After conducting in-depth interviews to determine the application of smart FM tools in different types of properties and to identify the initiatives and barriers to smart FM tool application, three workshops were conducted to validate the findings and further investigate the influence of FM professionals on smart FM tools application in Hong Kong.

The findings of the case study revealed, firstly, that four types of smart FM tools – user-centric, safety and hygiene, maintenance and sustainability-oriented – are used to assist the delivery of FM services. Secondly, smart FM tools are shown to be useful in assisting FM activities. Thirdly, the existing barriers to smart FM tool application manifest differently in shopping malls, office buildings and residential buildings. Fourthly, smart FM tools are used to address the four attributes of user needs: comfort, health and wellbeing, convenience and information to occupants.

The value of this study lies in its focus on the industry level (FM industry) and the application process of smart FM tools in different types of property, revealing the benefits, initiatives and barriers to their future application. This study provides a comprehensive picture of the current status and elaborates the barriers to smart FM tool application, which will help FM practitioners to make strategic decisions on selecting and developing smart FM tools. Also, this study will facilitate smart FM tool application policy development.

This study aims to explore an emerging collection of smart building technologies, known as smart workplace solutions (SWS), in the context of facilities management (FM).

This study is based on semi-structured interviews with facility managers in Finland, Norway and Sweden who have deployed SWSs in their organizations. SWS features, based on empirical data from a previous study, were also used to further analyse the interviews.

It analyses the benefits that SWSs bring from the facility management point of view. It is clear that the impetus for change and for deploying SWS in the context of FM is primarily driven by cost savings related to reductions in office space.

This research has been conducted with a focus on office buildings only. However, other building types can learn from the benefits that facility managers receive in the area of user-centred smart buildings.

SWSs are often seen as employee experience solutions that are only related to “soft” elements such as collaboration, innovation and learning. Understanding the FM business case can help make a more practical case for their deployment.

SWSs are an emerging area, and this study has collected data from facility managers who use them daily.

This study aims to present the financial performance of companies and investment areas in the real estate investment trust (REIT) industry.

A fuzzy model for financial performance measurement (FM-FPM) was proposed through the collaboration of fuzzy axiomatic design (FAD) and fuzzy entropy weighting (FEW). For the data, financial ratios were used, and their importance and functional requirements were collected via a questionnaire survey.

The FM-FPM is a beneficial model to be used for a REIT industry based on the structured procedures of FAD and FEW techniques. It can be suitable to regularly evaluate the performance of REITs and their investment areas in financial means, especially in today’s turbulent business environment. The Turkish market that was considered to show the practical applicability of the FM-FPM demonstrated specifically that diversified real estate was found to rank first, followed by mixed-buildings, warehouses, shopping malls and hotels, respectively.

The FM-FPM can be employed for REIT industries in other countries and adapted to different industries. However, more respondents or a different set of criteria might lead to different outputs.

The FM-FPM may guide REIT managers and investors while making their decisions and controlling the performance of REITs and investment areas.

The FM-FPM may encourage low- and middle-income investors to make good use of their savings.

The research is first (1) to offer a FPM model in order to determine investable areas in a REIT industry and (2) to employ multiple criteria decision-making tools in order to measure the financial performance of individual companies and investment areas in a REIT industry.