CHICAGO—Corporate real estate used to be about facilities management, but in the past few years C-suite executives have started to look for CRE specialists that can transform how their employees interact with the built environment, boost productivity as well as save on operational costs.

“There is a real appreciation for data and analytics,” Maureen Ehrenberg, executive managing director of JLL's global integrated facilities management business, tells GlobeSt.com. That's a big change from just a few years ago when “there was a real focus on the physical assets.”

As a result, rather than operating within a silo, CRE executives are increasingly expected to work alongside other professionals from human resources and information technology and create systems that track how well a company's facilities help achieve overall business goals by attracting and retaining talent, essentially becoming management consultants rather than the old property management model. “A few years ago, you never saw that convergence.”

“If this sounds like the transformative outsourcing model we've seen in the IT sector, it's no coincidence,” she adds. Like the IT sector, the increasing complexity of CRE now calls for a much higher level of expertise and more investment in technology and training.

“If you've got a strategic agenda and are looking to rapidly implement your plan,” Ehrenberg says, outsourcing CRE to a partner that can do all this on a global basis is “a way to rapidly drive change without taking focus off your core business.”

“Many years ago, companies had a mantra that you should 'think globally, but act locally,'” she says. But advanced technologies that have transformed communications and the ability to analyze vast amounts of data means companies can flip that mantra and act globally. In fact, 73% of respondents to JLL's 2015 Global Corporate Real Estate Trends survey say their mandate to globalize is stronger or much stronger than three years ago, and 61% expect greater centralization and control in the CRE function in the next three years.

JLL also found that many major companies have decided to adopt the so-called 'thin client' model, consolidating the bulk of their real estate infrastructure, support personnel, enterprise services and software applications with one or two CRE vendors.

Ehrenberg has now been in her present job for about ten months. If there is one thing that has surprised her in that time “it's the amount of change that is happening so rapidly,” largely due to technology, and the expectations that this has created among C-suite executives. A chief executive officer she was recently talking to said that if anyone planned to take 24 months to complete a project “they may as well tell me they're going to get it done in five years.”