Trevor Vick is the CEO of software development and infrastructure identity asset firm UMIP. Opinions are the author’s own.
When two steel columns buckled on the 21st floor of a Manhattan construction project this July, the building safety industry watched a familiar sequence unfold.
Investigators and engineers scrambled to reconstruct what had happened to the 37-story tower, then mid-conversion from office space into more than 1,600 apartments.
Engineers examining the failure were cautioned against assuming the visible damage marked the full extent of the problem, since major structural elements are interconnected and a failure in one area often signals stress elsewhere.
Early accounts pointed toward a missing steel reinforcement plate, a detail that should have appeared in the project's engineering plans but never connected to the columns themselves, according to engineers cited by The Real Deal.
It would be easy to read this as a documentation failure. That undersells what happened. The tower documentation didn’t fail; instead, it suffered from a lack of continuity.
Every renovation, every code cycle, every material change was tied to whatever system, contractor or individual happened to be tracking it at the time. When that link broke, the connective thread of the asset's history broke with it.
The missing layer is not another document repository. It is a persistent history of the structure that connects every record, inspection, permit, renovation, owner, engineer and software platform to the same physical asset over its entire lifecycle.
Documentation answers the wrong question
This matters well beyond one incident, because even organizations with disciplined document management run into this issue. A document repository can answer what records exist on file. It cannot answer what has happened to a specific physical asset across its operating life.
As veteran facility managers retire, change jobs or move on, decades of undocumented building knowledge often leave with them. In other words, a building’s operating history is often locked in someone's head rather than in a system, according to a recent industry analysis of facility continuity from the Continuity Insights Management Conference found.
The same analysis cited International Facility Management Association projections that more than 45% of facility management professionals worldwide will retire within the next decade, a wave that will test how well institutional memory survives personnel turnover.
That is the same failure described two different ways.
Whether the loss shows up as a retiring engineer who carried undocumented knowledge out the door, or a repository that cannot say what a structure can and cannot support after decades of alterations, the cause is identical.
Nothing in these systems persistently follows the physical asset itself. The record lives with the software, the vendor or the employee, never with the infrastructure.
What emergency response actually requires
This is where the stakes get elevated. In a post-failure scenario, structural engineers, investigators and insurers are not simply looking for a folder of drawings. They need a reliable, continuous chain of custody for every material change made to a structure, traceable back to who made it, when and under what code cycle. A binder handed off at turnover cannot provide it.
What emergency response actually requires is closer to a vehicle identification number for a piece of physical infrastructure, 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. Think of it as a Carfax Vehicle History report for a building.
The layer the industry never standardized
Over the past several decades, the built environment has methodically standardized layer after layer of how infrastructure gets built and managed. CAD standardized design. BIM standardized information. GIS standardized location. IFC standardized interoperability. Digital twins standardized representation. Artificial intelligence is now beginning to standardize intelligence.
What none of those layers ever standardized is a structure’s history and identity: a persistent, portable reference that follows a piece of infrastructure across every one of those systems and throughout its lifecycle. Each new platform generation has improved how information about an asset is captured, but none has solved for what happens to that information once the platform, the vendor or the employee who understood it moves on.
A digital twin cannot remain continuous if the identity of the physical asset it represents is not continuous.
That distinction is worth stating plainly. Interoperability tells systems how to exchange information. Identity tells systems what they are exchanging information about. The industry has spent 50 years perfecting the first problem while leaving the second essentially unaddressed.
A different question to ask
The Manhattan conversion is useful not because documentation failed at a single point, but because the continuity of its documentation and identity likely failed across an entire history of changes.
The more productive question isn't how thoroughly infrastructure gets documented. It's why so little of it carries a persistent identity across ownership changes, renovations and software migrations.
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 persistently tracking a structure’s identity and history.
