The Facilities Leader's Playbook for Getting IT on Your Side

Summary: Getting IT on your side during a CMMS transition requires early alignment, deliberate relationship-building, and a business case framed in financial terms, not operational frustration. Enterprise facilities teams that treat IT as a stakeholder from the start, secure executive sponsorship before the roadmap is locked, and document every commitment along the way are the ones that hold their timelines when things get hard. This playbook draws on real-world experience from enterprise retail operators to walk FM leaders through exactly how to do it.

Most FM leaders treat the vendor decision as one of the hardest parts of a CMMS transition. It’s really not. The evaluation, the demos, the scoring matrices — that’s all within your control. What derails timelines more reliably than any vendor shortcoming is a single internal dynamic: a strained relationship with IT.

Getting that relationship right doesn’t happen automatically. It requires deliberate strategy, early action, and a willingness to do work that feels like it belongs in someone else’s lane.

At Fexa, we understand that navigating the IT relationship is one of the most underestimated challenges in any CMMS transition. Our implementation team is built to help you manage it.

Why is IT the most underestimated obstacle in FM tech projects?

Most FM teams treat the vendor decision as the hard part of a platform transition. IT friction actually kills a lot of well-planned timelines. 

IT departments aren’t interested in obstructing your projects. They want to contribute to the success of the company, just like every other department. However, they’re managing a queue of competing priorities and carrying the institutional memory of past implementations that went sideways. They’re also responsible for organizational risk in ways that FM teams often don’t fully see. 

If a facilities team presents them with a finished vendor evaluation and a preferred platform, IT’s first question won’t be “How do we help?” Instead, it will be, “Why weren’t we part of this?”

That feeling of exclusion — of being handed a decision they didn’t help shape, on a timeline they didn’t help set, for a system they’ll be responsible for supporting — can create problems. It has the potential to transform IT from a neutral party into an active obstacle. FM leaders know their operational requirements, while IT leaders often feel they own the process of fulfilling them. Neither side is in the wrong, but if that tension isn’t managed proactively, IT concerns can bring everything to a stop. 

IT is not your enemy. They will act like one, though, if you don’t treat them like a partner from the start.

How do you get on the IT roadmap before it’s too late?

IT roadmaps are typically built 12 to 18 months in advance, sometimes even two years out. If your project isn’t in that planning cycle, you’re already behind, and no amount of urgency on your end changes the queue. 

The most common mistake is running a full RFP and vendor evaluation without IT involvement, then presenting them with a finished decision. By that point, IT recognizes that they have no ownership in the outcome. Instead, they have every incentive to protect their existing workload. The alternative is to identify your IT stakeholders before your evaluation is complete, understand their planning calendar, and secure a place at the table before the roadmap is locked.

Incorporating your FM plans with IT’s roadmap is a worthwhile endeavor, and one of the best ways to do is to learn IT’s language. 

It’s important to understand IT’s constraints, their definition of a successful implementation, and the metrics they’re held to, as these are different from yours. Liz Cox, Facilities Analyst at Tractor Supply, reflected that she would have saved significant time and avoided friction if she had embedded herself more deeply in IT’s world earlier in the process: “Embed yourself in IT’s world more than maybe they want you to be.” 

A practical starting point: ask IT what a good implementation looks like from their side. That question alone changes the dynamic.

How do you build a business case for FM technology that IT and the C-suite will actually approve?

IT departments have clear requirements, defined timelines, and documented outcomes. FM teams often show up to meetings to voice their frustration, but frustration doesn’t move IT or executives. Evidence does.  

Myriah Kingen, Director of Facilities at Tractor Supply, experienced this challenge firsthand. She shared with Fexa that facilities leaders have to bridge the gap between operational pain and the language executives actually respond to. That means framing the case around headcount avoidance, hard dollar savings, reduction in manual work, and EBITDA implications. 

Myriah said, “If you walk in and say I’m frustrated, I need a new system, give it to me — that’s not going to go very far. Sometimes we have to be translators — between the facility needs and what the executives will lean into.” 

The strongest business cases also account for IT’s specific concerns.That includes security requirements, integration complexity, support burden, and rollout risk. Showing up with those objections already addressed signals that the FM team has done the homework. It shifts the dynamic from adversarial to collaborative, and it’s disarming in a way that a polished ROI slide rarely is. 

A business case that speaks to FM needs, financial outcomes, and IT constraints simultaneously is the one that moves through approval. 

How do you get executive buy-in for a CMMS or FM platform, and when do you escalate?

IT roadmap prioritization is political. FM projects without a C-suite or senior VP-level champion get deprioritized when IT’s workload spikes (and it inevitably does). Getting executive sign-off early isn’t just about budget. It’s also about being at the right place in the queue. 

In a recent customer conversation shared internally, a facilities team completed a thorough RFP process, built a credible business case, and secured internal champions at the SVP level. When they finally got in front of the company president and the EVP of IT, the IT executive challenged the entire methodology, claiming the evaluation had been run without IT’s involvement. The result was a timeline delay of over a year. This wasn’t because the business case was wrong. Rather, it was because IT alignment hadn’t been built in parallel with the vendor evaluation. 

A parallel success story comes from Tractor Supply. Their team secured senior buy-in upfront, got on the roadmap, and when IT tried to push the go-live from March to June without warning, Myriah pushed back hard. She engaged senior leadership, held last-minute meetings, and refused to cede the timeline. Advising others, she says, “It’s your project. You have to fight for your timelines.” 

That fight was winnable because the commitments had been documented and the executive relationships had been built. Escalation is a legitimate move, but it only works when the groundwork is already there.

Document everything as you go. Roadmap confirmations, milestone agreements, and meeting outcomes are all essential.  As Liz Cox put it: “We have the receipts.” 

How do you turn the IT department into a champion for your FM platform?

IT departments have often been burned by failed implementations. Past project disasters leave scar tissue, and when a new project comes along, IT’s instinct is self-protection. If you can help them succeed with your implementation, that dynamic flips. IT becomes your advocate.

Structure your rollout to minimize their burden. Clear documentation, phased timelines, and a vendor implementation team that reduces the lift on IT’s side all make a difference. Tractor Supply’s goal was to make the back-end migration invisible to stores, and the same logic applies to IT. When they don’t feel the disruption, they don’t generate resistance.

When the implementation goes smoothly, make sure IT gets credit for it. That recognition matters, and it builds goodwill for the next project. The goal is to establish a working dynamic that makes future technology decisions easier for everyone involved. An ongoing partnership is worth more than a one-time win.

What steps should facilities leaders take right now to get IT alignment?

If a CMMS transition is anywhere on your horizon, these are the moves to make before you need them:

• Map your IT stakeholders now: know who owns implementation, who handles security review, and who influences the CTO or CIO
• Find out when IT’s next planning cycle opens and how to get a project named before it closes
• Translate your business case into financial and operational terms IT leadership will respect — headcount avoidance, integration costs, and support load
• Identify your executive sponsor and confirm their alignment explicitly, not assumed
• Build IT’s concerns into your proposal from the start:  security, integration requirements, and rollout risk
• Document everything: timelines, commitments, and  meeting outcomes
• Treat IT as a long-term partner, not a one-time gatekeeper

The facilities teams that get their implementations approved and launched on schedule aren’t the ones with the most polished decks. They’re the ones who started the IT conversation early, built the internal coalitions to hold their timelines, and made IT feel like a co-owner of the outcome — not an afterthought. 

Fexa’s implementation team has helped enterprise facilities leaders navigate the IT relationship from day one. See how it works — Schedule a demo today.