Buyer Beware: Expect Urges Tactical, Not Pervasive, Systems Integration

The recent date change to the year 2000 notwithstanding, it’s a difficult time to be given the task of automating the real estate portfolio management function. Obviously technology is essential to efficient management of the many tasks known collectively as portfolio management. And most corporate real estate executives by now have heard the chorus of experts urging buyers of systems to shop only for those solutions that integrate virtually every piece of the business having anything to do with corporate work space and its inhabitants.

On the surface, that advice is correct and should be taken very seriously. For unless work space managers have access to human resource department intelligence and information technology channels, they will operate in a vacuum and miss opportunities to add value to the organization’s mission. However, the time to sort out exactly what ought to be integrated with what is at the onset of a portfolio management automation exercise, not at the end. Nor is it appropriate to go into a portfolio management system retooling effort thinking the key is to integrate everything that can be integrated, which put simplistically, is the mantra of an increasingly vocal school of thought.

What to Integrate?

“This whole model of going in and doing an entire process re-engineering and analyzing every system and trying to get them all completely connected through one integrated system is not necessarily going to have to happen for a company’s infrastructure, which is the term being used by proponents of infrastructure resource planning,” says Wade Fransson, director of IT consulting at CB Richard Ellis, who recently completed extensive research into real estate portfolio management systems as part of the Corporate Real Estate Portfolio Alliance. Fransson works in the firm’s Newport Beach, Calif., office.

Infrastructure managers use as many as nine categories of systems to monitor and maintain wiring and cabling, maintenance, architectural drawings and administration of facilities, to name just a few key functions. And each category has a dozen or more software vendors competing for market share. “It’s a horrible puzzle for a corporate real estate executive who may have very little technology training to sort through and make the right moves in putting together a long-term solution,” says Fransson.

Certain mega-solutions are now available that help simplify the process in that they automate the entire infrastructure management process, no matter where facilities are located, who occupies them or what their role is in the organization’s strategic mission. They may well be the right approach for an organization in need of a systems re-engineering. But Fransson urges caution, particularly where the integration mantra is concerned.

Mixing Oil and Water

“I personally have seen examples of integration that was misguided, where a lot of money was spent that actually achieved a negative result,” he relates. “It sounded good to integrate certain functions, but in reality, they shouldn’t be integrated from a technology perspective.” Fransson admits he differs from many in the field by holding this view. “But they may have a stake in making that assumption stick,” he posits. One large corporation integrated its CAD [computer-aided design] system with its lease administration function, he illustrates, because they wanted to get away from the fact that the two track square footage differently. Integration would solve that, went the thinking.

“But the square footage tracked in your CAD system has to be different than that in your lease administration system, because the lease is not based on the technical square footage from the CAD drawing — there are different ways of looking at square feet,” Fransson points out. “If you change something in a line drawing, and it’s integrated, then suddenly the square footage changes in the lease. But that’s not the agreement you signed, so you can’t have that. Nor should you force the CAD drawing to be changed because you have a change in the lease agreement. To remedy that, they had to go in and change the line drawings to get the lease square footage to reflect accurately. That’s an example of wrong integration. You can integrate it, but what’s the point?” The company “poured a lot of money into that effort, and it failed — they had to scrap it all,” Fransson relates, not because the technology was flawed, but because the solution was too expansive.

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