07 Your Shiny Building Smells like Rotten Data and Deferred Maintenance

New Café ZAi Episode, with Birgitta Foster

That new building smell? It fades.
Then it starts to smell like budget gaps, moldy ductwork, outdated spreadsheets……and the LEED Platinum plaque still gleaming on the wall.

Welcome to the post-ribbon-cutting reality, where sustainability goals crash into aging systems, talent loss, and siloed data.
Or as we like to say: it’s a classic #PainInTheGlass.

I sat down with Birgitta Foster to talk about what really happens after the glamour fades — and how AI, TCO, and strategic planning can help owners stay ahead of the rot.

We covered:

Why deferred maintenance is bleeding portfolios dry
How TCO reframes lifecycle decisions
Birgitta’s use of AI agents as digital interns
Succession planning in a shrinking workforce
How to find your mission-critical vulnerabilities
Why systems must stay connected, even if decentralized
And how C-suite pressure is forcing legacy systems to open up

Birgitta brings serious credibility.
She’s Programmatic Infrastructure Program Manager at Sandia National Laboratories, managing 7,000+ assets that support national security — and she’s helped shape the very standards the industry runs on.

Birgitta Foster serves as the Programmatic Infrastructure(PI) Program Manager at Sandia National Laboratories, where she oversees morethan 7,000 real property assets across approximately 300 buildings. Theseassets serve as critical building system components supporting Sandia’s diversenational security missions. As the subject matter expert on equipment propertytype determination, she plays a key role in ensuring accurate assetclassification and lifecycle planning.

Her responsibilities span inventory oversight, riskmanagement, and sustainment planning and execution. She manages the funding ofthe annual $1.4 million PI maintenance budget and evaluates mission impact toprioritize risk buydown investments. Birgitta has been a driving force behindthe integration of PI asset data and location into a Geographic InformationSystem (GIS) and is a leading contributor to the development of Sandia’s AssetManagement (ISO 55001) framework.

A cornerstone of the PI Program is risk management,including comprehensive Criticality Analyses (ACRN) to identify and prioritizehigh-risk assets. From these analyses, the Program leverages interactivedashboards to enable data-driven, risk informed decision-making for strategic,like-for-like replacement planning to reduce deferred maintenance and supportrisk buydown funding requests. She collaborates closely with Sandia’s inhouse design,construction, and project management teams to execute timely and effective replacementsof high-risk equipment, minimizing disruptions to mission-critical operations.

With over 30 years of experience, Birgitta is aninternationally recognized expert, author, and speaker on Building InformationModeling (BIM) for Owners. Her BIM2FM strategies, Design for Maintenance andTransition to Operations, have appeared in Journal of BIM. She previouslyserved as Assisting Director of the buildingSMART alliance, supporting theNational BIM Standard–US, and was an early member of the BIMForum’s Level ofDevelopment (LOD) Specification Core Group and the USACE/Industry BIMConsortium.

Internationally, she serves on the buildingSMARTInternational (bSI) Standards Executive Committee, guiding the development ofIFC standards for Open BIM. In 2019, she was honored as one of the first womeninducted as a bSI Fellow. Birgitta holds a Bachelor of Science in MechanicalEngineering from the University of Texas and an Executive MBA from the AndersonSchool of Management at the University of New Mexico.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/birgitta-foster-380a5217/