Invisible Data Curation Practices: A Case Study from Facility Management

TL;DR

This paper explores how janitors' unseen data curation practices in facility management influence data quality, highlighting their undervaluation and proposing training to improve engagement and data stewardship.

Contribution

It provides a detailed case study on janitors' roles in data curation, applying the 'invisible work' framework to reveal their impact and suggesting practical training interventions.

Findings

Janitors are treated more like sensors than human curators.

Their limited engagement leads to poor data correction.

Applying the framework helps interpret data curation practices.

Abstract

Facility management, which concerns the administration, operations, and mainte-nance of buildings, is a sector undergoing significant changes while becoming digitalized and data driven. In facility management sector, companies seek to ex-tract value from data about their buildings. As a consequence, craftsmen, such as janitors, are becoming involved in data curation. Data curation refers to activities related to cleaning, assembling, setting up, and stewarding data to make them fit existing templates. Craftsmen in facility management, despite holding a pivotal role for successful data curation in the domain, are understudied and disregarded. To remedy this, our holistic case study investigates how janitors' data curation practices shape the data being produced in three facility management organiza-tions. Our findings illustrate the unfortunate that janitors are treated more like a sensor than a human data curator. This treatment makes them less engaged in data curation, and hence do not engage in a much necessary correction of essential fa-cility data. We apply the conceptual lens of invisible work - work that blends into the background and is taken for granted - to explain why this happens and how data comes to be. The findings also confirm the usefulness of a previously pro-posed analytical framework by using it to interpret data curation practices within facility management. The paper contributes to practitioners by proposing training and education in data curation.