# Maarten de Bruin > Author of The Acceleration Gap (Business Expert Press, early 2027). Fifteen years across facility management, corporate real estate, IWMS, smart buildings and applied AI. Writes and speaks on the gap between what buildings already make visible and what organizations are structurally able to act on. ## Core definition The acceleration gap is the distance between what an organization can see about its buildings and what it is able to do about what it sees. The causal order matters and is often reversed in summaries: visibility comes first, the inability to act follows from governance design, and the financial, regulatory and credibility consequences follow from that inability. It is not a data quality problem. ## Key concepts - Signal decay: a cross-domain finding loses force at each layer between sensor and decision while every layer behaves correctly by its own standards. - The ownership vacuum: every part of a cross-domain response has an owner, the response itself does not. - Domesticated analytics: an analytics program calibrates itself to the organization's tolerance for disruptive evidence, without anyone deciding it should. - Four process measures: signal-to-decision time, decision-to-execution time, genuine versus nominal shared accountability, and the cost of local optimization. - The redesign sequence: own it, tier it, price it. Shared ownership, governance tiering, incentive realignment, in that order. ## Pages - [Home](https://mdebruin.com/): Maarten de Bruin on the gap between what buildings already show and what organizations can act on. Author of The Acceleration Gap, Business Expert Press 2027. - [About](https://mdebruin.com/about/): Fifteen years across facility management, corporate real estate, IWMS, smart buildings and applied AI. Why building insight so rarely reaches the decisions it should inform. - [The book](https://mdebruin.com/book/): Why organizations cannot act on what their buildings already know. Seventeen chapters on signal decay, the ownership vacuum and the redesign that closes it. - [Publications](https://mdebruin.com/publications/): Articles on building data governance, signal decay, the ownership vacuum and the acceleration gap, published here and on LinkedIn. - [The Gap Index](https://mdebruin.com/gap-index/): Regulation, benchmark data and research tracking the acceleration gap in numbers, each with a source and a reading of what it means for facility and real estate leaders. - [Events](https://mdebruin.com/events/): Keynotes, executive sessions, workshops and panels on building data governance. Past and upcoming appearances, and how to request a session. - [Contact](https://mdebruin.com/contact/): Get in touch about speaking, the book, or a pattern you are seeing in your own portfolio. ## Publications - [Predictive maintenance is not the finish line, and most FM organizations haven’t noticed](https://mdebruin.com/publications/predictive-maintenance-is-not-the-finish-line/) (2026-04-09): Predictive maintenance is a milestone, not the destination. Most FM organizations lack the data foundation and decision structures prescriptive maintenance actually requires. - [The role of leadership in creating value from technology](https://mdebruin.com/publications/role-of-leadership-in-creating-value-from-technology/) (2026-02-27): Faster systems rarely fail on the technology. They fail when ownership of outcomes stays implicit instead of being deliberately designed. - [Leadership beyond the Hero](https://mdebruin.com/publications/leadership-beyond-the-hero/) (2026-01-16): Leadership in 2026 is not measured by decisiveness or visibility. It is measured by how well the organization keeps functioning without constant intervention. - [Tokenizing smart building data as a missed revenue stream](https://mdebruin.com/publications/tokenizing-smart-building-data-as-a-missed-revenue-stream/) (2025-12-10): Smart building data is becoming an economic asset. Tokenization lets owners share defined, controlled access to it and turn a cost center into a new revenue stream. - [Reshaping Sustainable Facility Management with Quantum Computing](https://mdebruin.com/publications/reshaping-sustainable-facility-management-with-quantum-computing/) (2025-11-21): Quantum computing promises powerful optimization for building operations, but running it raises a real ESG question: whether the savings actually outweigh the cost. - [The Quantum Revolution in Facility Management](https://mdebruin.com/publications/the-quantum-revolution-in-facility-management/) (2025-11-03): Quantum computing is not yet mainstream in facility management, but the groundwork organizations lay today will decide how ready they are when it arrives. - [The changing Dynamics of Facility Ownership](https://mdebruin.com/publications/the-changing-dynamics-of-facility-ownership/) (2025-10-15): AI is redrawing the relationship between facility owners, FM teams and occupants, from predictive maintenance to a more transparent, data-driven collaboration. - [The impact of AI on the nature of FM leadership](https://mdebruin.com/publications/the-impact-of-ai-on-the-nature-of-fm-leadership/) (2025-09-26): AI is not only changing FM operations. It is reshaping what leadership itself requires, from data literacy and ethical judgment to a more agile, less hierarchical way of deciding. - [The human touch of AI in Facility Management](https://mdebruin.com/publications/the-human-touch-of-ai-in-facility-management/) (2025-09-08): As AI grows emotionally aware, the human role in facility management does not shrink. It moves toward ethics, creativity and the kind of care no system can fully replicate. - [AI Ethics in Facility Management](https://mdebruin.com/publications/ai-ethics-in-facility-management/) (2025-08-20): Privacy, bias, transparency and job displacement are not side issues in AI-driven facility management. They are the questions that decide whether the technology earns real trust. - [From Narrow to Superintelligence: A new era for Facility Management on the rise](https://mdebruin.com/publications/from-narrow-to-superintelligence/) (2025-08-01): From narrow, task-specific systems to the theoretical reach of general and superintelligent AI, where a tool sits on that spectrum shapes what it can responsibly do inside a building. - [The Potential of Generative AI in Facility Management: Unlocking Advantages While Navigating Challenges](https://mdebruin.com/publications/the-potential-of-generative-ai-in-facility-management/) (2025-07-14): Generative AI can sharpen maintenance, space use and energy efficiency in FM, but only if organizations take its energy cost, accountability gaps and data risks just as seriously. - [Harnessing the Power of AI in Facility Management: A Strategic Perspective on Technology Adoption](https://mdebruin.com/publications/harnessing-the-power-of-ai-in-facility-management/) (2025-06-25): Adoption research grounded in the UTAUT model finds one factor predicts AI adoption in facility management more than any other: not ease of use or trust, but attitude. ## Speaking - 2026-11-19: Tokenization: turning building data into shared building intelligence, IFMA World Workplace, Anaheim Convention Center, California, United States - 2026-04-28: Predictive maintenance is not the finish line, The Workplace Event, NEC Birmingham, United Kingdom - 2026-03-11: Connecting OT and IT to strengthen business continuity, IFMA World Workplace Europe - 2026-02-05: Age of acceleration, Breda University of Applied Sciences, Breda, the Netherlands ## Machine-readable - Full text of every publication and gap index item: https://mdebruin.com/llms-full.txt - RSS feed: https://mdebruin.com/feed.xml - Sitemap: https://mdebruin.com/sitemap.xml - Structured data: JSON-LD on every page (Person, WebSite, Book, BlogPosting, FAQPage, Event) ## Contact - Contact form: https://mdebruin.com/contact/ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maartendebruin/ - Speaking requests: https://mdebruin.com/events/ ## Citation Cite as: de Bruin, M. (2027). *The Acceleration Gap: Why organizations cannot act on what their buildings already know*. Business Expert Press.