The problem
In most buildings, infrastructure changes happen informally. A vendor "just needs fifteen minutes in the closet." A carrier "just needs to run one cable." Each event seems small, and none of them are recorded, so the building's documented state drifts further from reality every week.
The risk
Undocumented change is the root cause behind most infrastructure disputes: the disconnected circuit nobody admits to, the breaker that trips because three vendors shared it, the pathway that is full of cable no one owns. When something breaks, the absence of change records turns a one-hour fix into a multi-day investigation, and makes proving due diligence impossible if the dispute escalates.
Understanding it
IT organizations solved this problem decades ago with change management: no change to a production system without a request, an approval, a scope, and a record. Building infrastructure deserves the same discipline, because it is production infrastructure, for every tenant in the building at once.
GDS treats every carrier access request as an infrastructure change request. Each one must identify the tenant, the suite, the business purpose, the scope of work, and the responsible party. No tenant, no access request. Changes to shared or life safety systems get additional review because their blast radius extends beyond a single suite, to building operations and to first responders.
Best practices
- Require a change request for all infrastructure work, including "quick" visits.
- Tie every request to a tenant, suite, business purpose, scope, and responsible party.
- Apply extra review to changes touching shared systems: power, pathways, DAS, ERRCS.
- Verify completed work against the approved scope before closing the request.
- Keep the change log reconciled against periodic physical audits.
How GDS delivers it
- Change request intake, validation, and approval workflow
- Scope review with impact analysis for shared and life safety systems
- Scheduling and technician verification
- Post-work verification against approved scope
- Permanent, owner-controlled change history for the property
Common questions
Is formal change management overkill for a single building?
The process scales to the property. For a single mid-rise, it can be as light as a standardized request form, verification at the door, and a change log. The discipline matters more than the tooling.
What qualifies as an infrastructure change?
Any work that installs, removes, modifies, or connects to building infrastructure: cabling, cross-connects, equipment, power, antennas, or pathway usage. If a technician needs access to a telecom space, it is a change.