Key Takeaways
- Every generation looks at IT in buildings from a different experience, which creates a different blind spot each time.
- The older generation often sees digital infrastructure as the tenant's responsibility, while younger users expect connectivity to simply be there.
- IT is a young building layer that has only recently started to seem self-evident, even though everyone has meanwhile become fully dependent on it.
- The IT-Label makes a building's digital quality clear, regardless of who is looking at it.
- Awareness does not start with technology, but with a shared language for something you cannot see.
In real estate, people from different generations talk to each other about buildings every day. They share concepts such as square meters, delivery levels, rental prices, and maintenance. But as soon as the conversation turns to a building's digital layer, it becomes clear that everyone means something different. One person thinks of a connection point in the meter cupboard, another thinks of wifi that works everywhere, and a third wonders why this is even a topic.
These differences are not a matter of more or less understanding. They stem from the era in which someone grew up with technology. Someone raised with a fixed telephone line looks at connectivity differently than someone for whom internet always seemed to arrive wirelessly out of thin air. That background determines what you consider self-evident, and that is precisely where the blind spot arises.
The result is that the most important building layer of this moment keeps floating in conversations. Nobody denies its importance, but nobody describes it in the same way. The IT-Label was created to solve exactly that problem: a shared way to discuss digital quality, regardless of the technology you grew up with.
Every generation its own frame of reference
For those who know the office of the 1980s, IT was something added on afterward. There was a building, and the user arranged their own telephone connection and later a modem. In that logic, digital infrastructure is explicitly the tenant's concern, not the building's. That view still carries through today, for example in the way responsibilities are divided in the lease agreement.
The next generation grew up with broadband and saw the internet take on a central role in the workplace. For them, a good connection is expected, but it remains something you request and connect. They think in terms of speed and subscriptions, less in terms of the physical infrastructure that makes it possible.
The youngest users know only a world in which connectivity is everywhere. Internet feels like it comes out of thin air, out of a phone, out of nothing visible. That very sense of ease is misleading, because behind that wireless convenience there is always a physical layer of fiber optics, cabling, and equipment. Where that layer is missing or falls short, the convenience disappears.
Today's outage is almost never the fault of the air. It is the bill for a building layer that nobody named.
IT has existed for only a short time, yet everything relies on it
It is useful to realize how young this layer actually is. Where a building lasts decades and an energy supply has been self-evident for more than a century, digital infrastructure in its current form is of much more recent origin. The leap from telephone line to digital lifeline took place within a single generation.
That speed explains why market habits lag behind reality. We have a language and a set of agreements for bricks, installations, and energy, but hardly any for data. At the same time, dependence has become total: from payment transactions to access control, from climate control to meetings, everything runs over the same connection.
That makes digital infrastructure comparable to other basic provisions. It is defensible to state that IT and energy have meanwhile become two equal foundations of modern real estate. The difference is that energy has been made visible with a label, while the digital layer has not, for a long time.
Why the blind spot creates risk
As long as everyone assumes someone else will take care of it, no one fully takes care of it. The owner assumes the tenant will arrange their own connection, the tenant expects the building to be suitable, and the user assumes connectivity is simply there. Those assumptions only collide the moment something goes wrong.
During an outage, the true cost of the blind spot becomes visible. Not just in inconvenience, but in downtime, lost productivity, and sometimes in safety. Anyone who wants to know how large that cost can be should look into what internet outages actually cost a business. The outcome makes clear that this is not a minor topic.
The solution does not lie in more technology, but in clarity beforehand. If it is known what digital delivery level a building or space offers, the assumptions disappear. Then a tenant knows what is in place, an owner knows what they are offering, and the user knows what to expect.
From assumption to agreement
A shared classification helps bring these different frames of reference together. Instead of each generation using its own words, everyone refers to the same level. A vague feeling about connectivity thus turns into a concrete agreement that can be recorded and checked.
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Request IT-labelOne language for something you cannot see
The IT-Label reduces a building's digital quality to an understandable classification, ranging from IT1+ PREMIUM for buildings heavily prepared for data use to IT5 SHELL for a property where the digital infrastructure still needs to be fully installed. None of these classifications is a judgment of good or bad; they describe what is present.
That neutral character is precisely what connects generations. Someone who sees IT as a tenant's matter and someone who considers connectivity self-evident can both look at the same label and draw the same conclusion. The discussion no longer revolves around what you are used to, but around what is factually present in the building.
In this way, awareness becomes a shared process. For one person, the label confirms that the digital layer genuinely matters; for another, it is the first time the invisible is made visible. In both cases, a conversation arises that was not possible before.
What you can do now
The first step is not technical, but mental: recognize that a building's digital layer is a building layer in its own right, with its own level and its own responsibility. Whoever does this stops assuming that someone else will take care of it.
It then pays to look at how the classification methodology is structured, so you know what the levels mean for your own situation. Take a look at how the IT-Label works and which level fits the use you have in mind. This way, you bring the blind spot into view, regardless of the generation you belong to.
