The problem
Building infrastructure knowledge lives in the heads of engineers who retire, vendors who lose the contract, and carriers who won't share records. What documentation exists is scattered across as-builts that were never updated, spreadsheets nobody maintains, and binders in the MDF that stopped being accurate a decade ago.
The risk
Missing documentation converts every incident into an investigation and every project into a discovery exercise. Outage restoration takes longer when nobody knows what a cable feeds. Tenant improvements stall when pathway capacity is unknown. And when the building sells, weak infrastructure records surface in due diligence as risk, and as leverage against your valuation.
Understanding it
Documentation is the foundation every other governance function stands on. You cannot control change to infrastructure you have not documented, and you cannot hold vendors accountable to a baseline that does not exist.
Good documentation is owner-controlled; it belongs to the property, not to whichever vendor happens to hold the contract. It covers the full path: entrance facilities and MPOE, telecom room layouts, riser and pathway utilization, carrier and circuit inventory, shared power and environmental systems, and rooftop and wireless installations. And it stays alive because it is updated as part of the change workflow, not as an annual afterthought.
Best practices
- Start with a physical baseline audit, trust the field, not the old as-builts.
- Document ownership for every cable and system; flag anything unclaimed for remediation.
- Keep records in ownership's control, portable across vendors and management changes.
- Update documentation as a mandatory step in every change request.
- Include life safety systems, ERRCS, DAS, fire alarm pathways, with compliance records.
How GDS delivers it
- Baseline field audits of telecom spaces, risers, and rooftop infrastructure
- Carrier, circuit, and cable inventory with ownership attribution
- Telecom room and pathway documentation with photos and layouts
- Change-driven record maintenance under the governance workflow
- Documentation packages for due diligence, refinancing, and dispositions
Common questions
Our as-builts are 15 years old. Where do we start?
With a field baseline, not the drawings. GDS audits actual conditions, what is installed, active, abandoned, and unowned, and builds current documentation from the field, using legacy drawings only as reference.
Who owns the documentation if we change vendors?
You do. GDS builds records as property assets deliverable to ownership. That portability is a core governance principle, documentation held hostage by a vendor is a liability, not an asset.