Get Better CRE Tech With Some Non-Tech Time

With all the emphasis on new technology for real estate, incorporating the now In technology, there’s an old saying about paving cow paths. You can use tech to automate and replicate what has been there before. It might be smoother, with sidewalks, and a traffic light or two. But in its heart, it’s still a meandering track left by a series of cows.

Which is fine for cows who get to wander, but probably not a good model for corporate efficiency. If you want things to work better, you need to know what they’re doing now and how they could be improved. Which is why taking some non-tech time is important.

In theory, software applications offer one of two approaches. The first is to allow enough configuration and customization to ensure that they work the way you want to. The other is to provide a pre-existing framework of how a particular business or commercial function should best function and then to impose that view on the users.

Theory, because vendors frequently stand somewhere in the middle. They have a theory, but aspects — perhaps large ones — can be modified. And then, using a rule of thumb, if you can get 80% of what you’re looking for, that’s probably a reasonable tradeoff from trying to write entire systems when that isn’t your area of expertise.

But before all this, the parade of vendors, the days of pitching and demonstrations, the need for cardiovascular intervention when someone presents the price tag, there is another good action. Take a step back, stop thinking of software, and look how your company actually works. Even if you have software, you can do the same thing.

The results can be baffling, like having an outsider join your company, look at critical business processes, draw flow charts, and then show them to management.

“What is this?”

“It’s how the company does this basic function.”

“Uh … what?”

There is a moment of shock when the steps are laid out before those who regularly use them. A maze, a tangle of lines and boxes, a flow that is difficult to follow without putting finger to paper and tracing each path.

Instead of trusting to software or battling with it, first wrestle with how you’ve set things up. Are your processes efficient and effective or do they wander back and forth between groups more than is necessary? Where does the necessary data reside? Does any single process require too many sign-offs? The better you do things, the more useful software can be, and the more easily you can find better matches.