Yao Morin On Being JLL's First Chief Technology Officer

Yao Morin, JLL’s new first chief technology officer, has got her hands full as JLL undergoes “technology transformation,” as she tells GlobeSt.com. That includes more than a thousand software engineers, data engineers, data scientists, and analysts in JLL Technology. It sounds like a lot of people, and is, but still chalks up only a percent or so of the company’s full global size of 100,000 employees across 84 countries.

“Our strategy is a healthy balance of build, buy, and partner,” Morin says, referring to a traditional breakout for technical organizations. That includes building what requires core expertise and then buy or partners to bring in other capabilities. There’s also a lot of consolidation that needs to happen.

“JLL has been using technology for a very long time and it’s a 230-year-old company,” Morin explains. “As time goes by, you accumulate a lot of software and technology pieces. We have been striving to consolidate a lot of the technology we’re using.”

But demand will clearly outweigh supply. “We have to be very stringent on how we prioritize what we do,” she says. “Otherwise, there would always be more things that we want to do than we have people to do.”

Making decisions is one step, but then there are the training and support needed to convince people to give up what they’ve known and used for something new. Without the right approach, the result can be resentment and people who refuse to give in. The right new software is also important. “We have to build software that our customers love, whether external clients or internal customers,” she says. “If we build crappy software, it doesn’t matter what kind of change management we have. Nobody is going to use it.” Work with training to get people onboarded with the new software.

And then there’s keeping up to speed with new technologies, like the body of techniques called artificial intelligence, including expert rules from many years of experience, machine learning, and the newest generative large language model systems. “We definitely have thought about how we safeguard our data; how do we make sure we’re putting in guidelines.”

In addition to the in-house development arm, there is a separate IT group with a chief information officer handling laptops, mobile phones, and data centers. “We have a very modern cybersecurity office as well,” says Morin. “It is separate from the software development organization, but they are very much part of JLL Technologies.”

One of the important tasks Morin’s group faces is to further ramp up a software as a service, or SaaS, which is growing at a 35% to 40% annual basis, projected to reach $500 million in sales by 2027.

“Commercial real estate sounds like an older industry and JLL has been around for 230 years, but we are cutting edge and we are trying to be on top of the newest greatest technology.” The company feels the need to prove itself a leader.