By Richard Jordan and Susan Spiers
Work&Place Journal Issue 2 – February 2013 Pages 08-11
Tags: information management • real estate • facilities management
Every day, millions of people enter their workplace oblivious to the Herculean behind-the-scenes effort that has gone into ensuring that the workplace is able to support them. Their only interaction with the myriad of people, systems, and processes that make it all happen is the occasional service request, relocation, or renovation. Most workers don’t give a second thought to all that went into their workplace as they routinely go about their work.
They would be shocked to see the full scope of information management systems that corporate real estate and facilities deploys in order to provide a warm workplace in winter, a cool workplace in summer, a clean workplace every morning, and a workplace that supports the work they do day in and day out. They would be surprised to see the integration required of their organization to accomplish this feat. In a like manner, given the scope and complexity of the systems and processes, it is likely that few within corporate real estate and facilities (CRE&F) see the big picture and understand the complexity of what they are accomplishing on a daily basis. To help improve this understanding, RealComm developed a diagram; it made its debut November 12th 2012 at CoreTech in Chicago.
To see graphically the scope and scale of CRE&F functions and the processes, activities, systems and assets involved is a bit humbling. In many companies, CRE&F was transformed long ago from “the guys that make cold rooms warm” to a sophisticated organization managing the largest asset of the enterprise.
Does the diagram embody every organization’s model? Given the broad range of tools, talent, complexity, size, scale, and maturity of CRE&F organizations, the answer is “not exactly.” That said, here is what Howard Berger, managing partner of RealComm and the leader of the team of industry experts who developed the model, has to say about it:
“The diagram represents early thinking and is essentially a rough roadmap of potential opportunities for data and application interoperability in CRE enterprises. The possibilities are endless and I think IT will play an important role. The more that IT understands the business, especially the data relationships, the more fruitful the insights derived from the information mashups. Meanwhile, I think CRE needs to drive it and needs a vision, good data, solid processes, and the analytical tools to get the ball rolling.”
However, according to Brad Sill, Walmart International Real Estate’s director system & strategy, “This diagram actually does well represent many large corporate organizations like ours as real estate is not our core business but is a major component in our information supply chain. In many cases, we have found that real estate has the foundation information that many other parts of the organization use for master data in their parts of the organization.
One of the biggest opportunities for large corporations is figuring out the center circle of Consolidated Data / Analytics & Business Process Automation when dealing with the reality of diverse business areas with differing data models depicted on the chart. This is no small feat to accomplish but this is a very good diagram depicting the reality for many of us in the corporate real estate space.”
Purpose
I believe that the diagram advances our understanding of the corporate real estate and facilities space. It takes into account the systems we now see across our industry; the systems we own, leverage, link to, want or dream about during idle moments. It links them together in a manner that minimizes the physical connections and emphasizes the focus and function. It graphically highlights the interactions with the other corporate functions within the enterprise. And it accomplishes these things while rarely calling out a system per se, excepting the industry standard generic systems (CAFM, ERP, etc).
The diagram serves as a starting point for discussions within CRE&F about who we are and how we best serve the enterprise, and it should guide our stewardship of the assets under our management. Building an understanding of the full scope of what an organization does, and how it interacts with not only the rest of the corporate functions but with itself, should lead to a more integrated, focused, collaborative operation. It offers a path to the future, if not a definitive model. Lawrence Melton, Assistant Commissioner, Public Buildings Service, GSA, suggests that “while this diagram may not represent the facilities/real estate organizations of today, an ideal organization will provide these market offerings seamlessly in a future full service facilities management organization.”
A starting point
While the diagram may not be your model, there is great benefit in an analysis of the organization to gain clarity. The initial challenge is to understand fully where your functions reside, where the responsibility is, and whether the interactions and connections make sense given the unique parameters of your organization. To Howard’s point, the diagram is a rough starting point, but there is a great deal of truth to it. The organization in the diagram is logical and not encumbered by the usual politics and bias that has driven so many organizational designs.
The diagram may be accurate or it may need further development, but it should be used to drive the conversation about integration of all the functions, systems, activities, and data that currently exist within a CRE&F organization. Aligning the functions of the organization so that they work together and support each other with relevant, timely, actionable information has the potential to deliver huge gains without buying, configuring, and implementing yet another tool. Turning all the little bits of data that already exist within a CRE&F organization into a large pool of data that can be mined for insight is an opportunity that should not be overlooked.
Standardized processes
An underlying assumption of the model is that all the business processes supporting all the activities within the boxes are efficient, effective, and, to the extent they can be, globally standardized. It makes no sense to build, analyze, and take actions based on patterns and trends from non-standard processes. Further, if a process is standardized, then every attempt should be made to ensure that it is efficient and effective. While it might seem unreasonable to think that there are inefficient, ineffective, yet standardized processes, there are many examples. Using insights from this kind of data would have greatly reduced value. It could also have unintended consequences for the functions and processes that have interactions with, provide support for, or are dependent on the output. Making sure that your business processes are efficient, effective and standardized is a golden opportunity for a CRE&F organization, and should be prioritized above adding or abandoning tools. A current tool may actually be able to perform if the process was fixed, and a new tool will be less effective if the process it supports is defective. Garbage in, garbage out, only faster.
The bubble at the center of the diagram serves to highlight a critical set of activities, the breadth of their influence, and the scope of data sources that can be drawn from. For most organizations, the reality is that while there are systems, programs and processes in place (or planned) to carry out all the identified functions and activities of CRE&F, the likelihood that even some of them truly share and use data is low. Rarely is there any true consolidation and analysis of all the data available from all the various data gathering programs in place. Intuitively we know there should be, along with an effort to align the organization (and therefore, the organization’s focus and efforts), with the data.
Lawrence Melton, looking forward to the future state, notes that “we (Public Buildings Service, GSA) have seen the importance of organizational alignment with these programs, and while most see them as a support function of the real estate organization, we see them as part of the solution and market offering.”…