Challenges Facing Facilities Management in the Automation and Digital Transformation of Private Universities

Digital transformation (DT) and automation can move campus operations from reactive repair to proactive asset management, yet facilities management (FM) in private higher education still relies on manual workflows and fragmented legacy infrastructure. Aligned with Saudi Vision 2030, this study quantifies the barriers impeding DT adoption in private university FM. A questionnaire covering 40 challenges across five dimensions, derived from a structured literature review, was administered on a four-point challenge scale to facilities managers (n = 60) and IT specialists (n = 60) drawn from six private universities in three regions of Saudi Arabia. Responses were converted into a Relative Challenge Index (RCI) and ranked; agreement was assessed with Spearman’s rank correlation and item-level differences with Mann–Whitney U tests under Holm–Bonferroni correction, with robustness established by bootstrapping (B = 10,000) and by weighting-scheme and sample-size sensitivity analyses. Facilities managers ranked legacy system incompatibility (RCI = 87.08%), absent IT–FM budgets (85.83%) and hidden integration costs (84.17%) highest; IT specialists prioritized cybersecurity risks (90.42%), legacy system incompatibility (90.00%) and poor platform integration (89.58%). The two groups reported statistically indistinguishable overall burden (Wilcoxon p = 0.702; equivalent to within ±10 percentage points by a two one-sided test, p = 0.0017) but agreed only weakly on its distribution (ρ = 0.390, p = 0.013), with 22 of 40 items differing significantly after correction. The FM–IT disconnect is therefore one of attention rather than intensity, and a four-quadrant priority matrix separates 14 consensus targets from 12 contested items requiring negotiated governance.