Commercial property: why is the most sociable of industries so anti-social?

June 2013

Given that property people love to chat, network and exchange gossip you’d have thought that they would be amongst the first to embrace social media. You would think that an industry that makes so much of being ‘a people business’ would flock to an outlet that was centered entirely around people.

Unfortunately not. In fact commercial property (office, retail but not residential) is maybe the least social sector out there. With a few exceptions the whole industry in social media terms is pretty much offline. Hardly anyone (in percentage terms) tweets, blogs, podcasts, produces videos, shares photos or otherwise engages with the ‘sharing economy’ at all.

Why is this? Frankly I’ve no idea. It’s not that the industry lacks brains, or personality, or bonhomie. The base ingredients for successful socialising. It’s not a stuffy world, in fact it is generally meritocratic and ‘go getter’. So why is it not, as an industry, knocking social out of the park like Angela Ahrendts of Burberry fame?

The answer surely is the perversely luddite take the industry has regarding technology. The times one comes across technological ignorance being worn as a badge of honour are legion. It’s almost like the aristocracy luxuriating in their scruffiness. The done thing is to not DO tech. I exaggerate perhaps, and an increasing minority are rebelling against this mindset but nevertheless the point is valid.

Does this matter? Well, I’ve certainly been challenged to explain exactly why ‘ I should bother’ many times. What’s in it for me?

SO, WHAT IS IN IT FOR YOU?

In summary the following; but it’s THE BIG POINT that counts (more on that later).

Personally you can meet a lot of very interesting people. It is unlikely where you work has a monopoly on brains so a shortcut to enquiring minds has to be a good thing.

Personally you can also demonstrate to all and sundry that you too are an interesting, skilled person with an enquiring mind. If you are not, try harder.

When interesting enquiring people, in the same line of business, collaborate and communicate then business gets done. It really does. You don’t sell on twitter, but it is a great sales tool.

Corporately you can do the same. With a twist. By showing you are a skilled outfit, employing enquiring interesting and engaging staff you will attract the best young talent. And without them, long term you are in trouble.

Corporately you can also turn yourselves into a real time, committed service provider. For example, why do annual tenant surveys when you could solicit the same information on an ongoing basis? Annual reports aren’t really actionable are they? Social media allows for a conversation with your customers. Both sides benefit. Do it. Your competitors will (sooner or later, even in property).

For individuals and corporately Twitter is an awesome ideas factory. Follow the right people, and you will come across a cornucopia of new ideas. And if you are familiar with The Wisdom of Crowds By James Surowiecki what could be better?

The above should be enough to answer ‘what’s in it for me’, though McKinsey in their report The social economy estimate that internal use of social media tools are three times more valuable. I’ll return to those internal tools in a later post. That value by the way is estimated by McKinsey at $900 billion to $1.3 trillion annually across just four business sectors.

However, all the above is to me missing THE BIG POINT;

Which is that if you do not interest yourself in these technologies the penalties will, given time, be huge. This is not a passing fad, something that is just for the kids or geeks. Sharing, social, collaborative and above all mobile technology is reshaping society and in turn will reshape all businesses. The glory days of 2002-2007 are not coming back. Most of the factors governing demand prior to ‘the great crash’ will not return. Demand will return, but it will be different quantitatively and qualitatively.

Servicing the new demand means understanding what users/customers want and how they want to be serviced. And emphatically you will not understand that staring at a Blackberry. You have to dive in and figure out the way things are now. Why has Facebook One Billion users? Or LinkedIn so powerful? Or mobile so pervasive? How will Cloud Computing make certain offices, businesses or people obsolete?

I have seen so much money wasted and opportunities lost by property related companies doing things the ‘old school’ way and completely failing to engage with their audience, their customers. Websites that cost a fortune to build but lack all interaction. New product/building launches that are just brochureware. Reports offered online that are unreadable on mobile devices. All because those commissioning these things do not use the technology and therefore have no idea how to do it right.

So THE BIG POINT is that all else is pointless unless you go with the flow and get social.

After all as @garyvee said just yesterday :

‘The best way to go out of business is to be romantic about how things used to be’

Antony

Tech for Commercial Property - Megatrend No 4: Connectivity

May 2013

Megatrends 1, 2 and 3 – Mobile, The Cloud and the Internet of Things – are dead in the water without Megatrend No 4: Connectivity.

Everything progressive, innovative, transformational about technology today is dependant on connectivity. It is the connective tissue that allows ‘The Modern World’ to function.

And we need more of it, at much higher speeds, available whenever and wherever.

Why?

Because every time bandwidth increases it enables a whole new cycle of technological innovation. Some things wished for years are suddenly possible and some things totally unexpected suddenly appear.

Go back to 2000. Early days of broadband. Lucky early adopters got access to 2mb broadband. Great BUT. Billions were wasted by media/web companies developing high spec sites and trying to roll out ‘video on demand’ type services. Nothing quite worked. The connectivity just wasn’t good enough. Today, with 100mb broadband at home, we think nothing off streaming live TV or movies. Hello Netflix, goodbye Blockbuster.

Or cast you mind back to 2007 and the launch of the iPhone. Yes, just 6 years ago. Transformational wasn’t it? The hot thing the day before was the clamshell Razr. Bang, game over. Then to now have been all about Apple and Android. The 1st iPhone didn’t even have 3G – now we have 20mb 4G. And how we use our phones has been revolutionised. Many of us hardly even use them as phones, or if we do we use Skype. No, these are portable computers with instant on and constant availability. Hell, we can even get fast wifi down the tube.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube. None even ten years old. But central to our lives. Or most of us. All the product of a world that moved from Dial Up Internet access to Broadband.

The image below shows the same scene, from the Pope’s inauguration, in 2005 and 2013. Spot the difference? Everything is the same, but different. Extrapolate to 2020….

Now let’s speed things up.

Larry Page of Google was asked at their developer conference this week why they were connecting up whole cities with Gigabit fibre internet (Google Fiber). His answer amounted to saying it’s just silly to not connect all their data centres to people at the fastest speed possible. So much computing power is now available (via the Cloud) that if you give people access to that power they will think of amazing things to do with it. Such as driverless cars, real time language translation, real time satellite mapping, voice controlled search and on and on. We simply do not know what will emerge. The key though is that we need connectivity at a speed comparable to the computing grunt we have available.

One hears much talk today of information overload, but that is exactly the wrong way to see things. The problem is not too much information, it is filter failure. The inability of your software to filter out what information you actually need. Who would not want the perfect answer available on demand? That though requires great filters. And it is these that swarms of developers are now working on providing via the cloud. Think of Apple’s Siri software on the iPhone. You ask it a question, it goes off to a monster data center, parses all the information available and returns you an answer. All in seconds.

Which is of course where superfast connectivity comes in. Get that and the unimaginable will happen.

Ironically the best chance you have of getting this today is if you live in rural Yorkshire. Fed up with being unplugged the great people at Br4n decided to lay their their own ‘fiber to the house’. And this is what they offer:

The UK Government has a stated aim to have the whole country wired up at at least 2mb by 2015. That is almost beyond parody it is so laughable a goal. In South Korea the aim is 100% at 2 Gigabit.

For about £5 billion we could fibre wire up the whole UK, in a few years. Instead it looks like we’ll spend £32 billion on a shiny new train set ready for use decades hence.

Time to get real UK. Connectivity matters. More than almost anything else.

Antony

PS: Two specific requests to the commercial property industry. First, if you are wise enough to offer free wifi in your buildings (you are wise aren’t you?) please make it fast enough that it is usable. Sharing a couple of mb between many users is not good enough. And secondly, stop the practice of offering free wifi but for only a short period of time. That does not help anyone.

Tech for Commercial Property - Megatrends No 3: The Internet of Things

May 2013

What is The Internet of Things?
The Internet of Things refers to a world where any physical object can be connected to the internet and thus be traced, tracked or monitored. And by being connected to the Internet each of these physical objects can communicate with any other physical object.

Why is it a megatrend for commercial property?
Because as more and more elements of the built environment become ‘wired’ then the way we relate to our surroundings will change. We will all be better informed about how the world around us operates, how we interact with it, and how we can make the most efficient, productive use of the world’s finite resources. For those involved with commercial property you will be able to improve the way people enjoy and interact with the built environment. And to a large extent it will the the responsibility of the commercial property industry to enable this step change. The great opportunity is that this connected world will enable the development of a wide range of services that can be provided on top of this wealth of real time data.

Is there a roadmap?
As the world of M2M (Machine to Machine) connectivity grows, more and more uses will become apparent. The potential is huge but as an introduction let’s just outline some of the most promising, with an emphasis on areas that touch on commercial property.

1. Real time information on the availability of parking spaces. And of course directions to get to them.

2. Real time monitoring of vibrations, movement and material conditions in buildings, roads and bridges.

3. Vehicles and pedestrian monitoring to optimize driving and walking routes.

4. Street lighting that adapts to weather, time of day and traffic or pedestrian flows.

5. Real time detection of rubbish levels to optimise clean up and collection.

6. Intelligent roads that enable traffic flows to be adjusted to suit climate conditions or traffic levels.

7. Realtime monitoring of CO2 emissions.

8. Pinpoint and early detection of burst pipes and or pressure levels.

9. The Smart Grid providing real time information on energy consumption and management.

10. Access control to restricted areas and detection of people in non-authorized areas.

11. Liquid detection in data centers, warehouses and sensitive building grounds to prevent break downs and corrosion.

12. Detection of gas levels and leakages in industrial environments.

13. Supply Chain Control: End to end real time information.

14. Machine/Vehicle auto-diagnosis and assets control. Equipment monitors itself, providing advance warning of problems.

15. Monitoring of temperature, gas levels etc

16. Locate indoor assets by use of active or passive tags. (Zigbee or RFID/NFC)

17. Remote control of all appliances.

18. Intrusion Detection Systems. Every door, window, opening monitored

Now, you may say that a lot of the above monitoring is and has been possible for a while, and indeed it has. The big difference though is that by connecting this data to the internet, in real time, enables us to plug it in to Cloud based analytics software and thus extract much more insight than previously possible. And this insight will lead to the services that will enable far more efficient and effective management of the environment around us.

Put all the above together and you can start to feel how a M2M enabled world could be improvement on our current lot. We can create and maintain a better environment. We can turn from being primarily reactive to active in how we manage the environment. We can decide how we want systems to behave and then monitor them with such granularity that we can ensure the outcome we desire.

This is a more for less world. Better by design. And commercial property will be at the heart of it.

Antony

PS For some fun stuff in this area check out Google’s self driving car project where everything really must talk to everything else. And their Google Glass also provides a blueprint as to how we might interact with all the data being given off by ‘things’ around us.

Below is an alpha release of a City wide dashboard as envisaged and created by the CASA research lab at UCL.

Tech for Commercial Property - Megatrends No 2: The Cloud…. Free at last!

May 2013

What do we want?….Freedom! When do we want it….Now!

Like Megatrend No1, No2 is all about freedom;

1. Freedom to work where and when we want
2. Freedom to compete on a level playing field
3. Freedom from the tyranny of IT departments
4. Freedom that comes from being up to date…always

Freedom to work where and when we want
The real value and indeed the real importance of Cloud Computing is the effect it could have on the way work is conducted and how we all manage our businesses.

There has been talk for years about the rise of the knowledge worker, the remote worker, the teleworker and the growing changes or pressures we all deal with in maintaining a life/work balance. Twenty years ago it was supposedly obvious that ‘the death of the office’ was nigh. Until recently though, not a lot actually changed. Offices remained the default workplace for nearly everyone. And nearly everyone worked from a fixed desk with a desktop PC set up specifically for them.

The Cloud will finally bring about the disruptive change that has been talked about for so long.

The OED defines Agile as ‘able to move quickly and easily’ . That is where business is going.

Make the most of your workplace, wherever that may be.

This does not mean the end of the office, as for many areas of work it will remain so that the office is the best place to get things done. But frankly, whilst sometimes it might be nice to be fixed to a desk, with a fixed line phone and a hard wired large monitor I believe for an increasing number of people breaking those permanent ties to a desk will be a strong desire. Particularly amongst those most skilled workers who will gravitate to employers that set them free.

Freedom to compete on a level playing field
The Cloud is the delivery mechanism for SaaS, Software as a Service. And what Software as a Service enables is for any company, big or small, to run the highest quality, most up to date software. And pay for it on a rolling per user subscription basis.

a) No large setup costs
b) No upfront licensing fees
c) No hardware requirements
d) No IT support

You simply want a service and you subscribe to it.

And if you don’t want it, you stop paying.

Such services include:

a) Backup/Storage (Amazon S3 etc)
b) CRM (Salesforce, Glasnost21 etc)
c) Accounts (Sage, Quickbooks, NetSuite etc)
d) Project Management & Collaboration (from simple Glasnost21 up to MS Project)
e) Sales Pipeline Management (Salesforce, Glasnost21 etc)
f) Email (Gmail etc)
g) Word processing, spreadsheets (Google Docs et al)
h) Increasingly your own business applications

Freedom from the tyranny of IT departments
Steve Jobs coined the term ‘the Post PC’ world. But he said that before it actually existed. Now it does. Globally more smartphones are sold each day than PC’s. And for the first time ever it is consumer technology that is leading the way over business tech. It used to be the case that the tools we had at work were better than we had at home. But now we are in the age of BYOD – bring your own device. And employees can now see great software is available on demand as well, and they want it. Just look how many people skirt around clunky Sharepoint and sign up for Dropbox instead.

And that will free you from the tyranny of the IT department. They will have to follow the desires of employees rather than dictate the archetypal ‘take what your given’ policy.

Freedom that comes from being up to date… always
With Cloud based services you always have the latest version of any software. No more using software from 3/5/7 years ago. And because you are not working with your own limited hardware but the mass ranks of sheer computational grunt available via SaaS suppliers you have access to a whole new world.

Not least of all you have access to everything, everywhere. We’re all used to having Google to hand as our ultimate pub quiz friend, but what if ALL the information you EVER dealt with at work was ALWAYS available to you, wherever you were? People have talked about ‘Information Overload’ for many years but that is the wrong way to see things. The real issue is Filter Failure. The inability of your software to filter out what information you actually need. Who would not want the perfect answer available on demand? That though requires great filters. And it is these that swarms of developers are now working on providing via the cloud. Think of Apple’s Siri software on the iPhone. You ask it a question, it goes off to a monster data center, parses all the information available and returns you an answer. All in milliseconds.

And this sort of cloud based service is coming on leaps and bounds.

Summary
These four broad advantages of The Cloud act as an introduction to why the Cloud is important and I hope intimate the affect widespread adoption could have on the way people work, and by implication the type of real estate that will be needed to support them. The Cloud will affect the amount of space required in the future, how it is configured, and where it exists. It will also save you money and it will transform your IT setup. It is transformational so do keep an eye on developments.

A stepchange in attitude to the Cloud was made last week when the UK Government announced its ‘Cloud First’ Policy – this calls for a presumption in favour of Cloud based services when procuring IT. Yes, from the ‘Bureaucrats’ in Government.

Now, who wants to be behind the public sector?

Antony

PS. Full disclosure. Glasnost21 is our CRM, Sales and Project Management SaaS. We wouldn’t recommend it to manage building The Shard but for small teams up to about 50 participants (Clients, Colleagues & Suppliers) it really does work well and adds great ‘openness & transparency’ to aid in getting things done.

We’d be delighted to show you around.

Tech for Commercial Property - Megatrend No 1: Mobile….and why you must bin the Blackberry.

May 2016

If Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted, they would probably have said ‘A faster horse’. That is what happens when megatrends kick in; what seems sensible one day seems plain silly the next. And that is what is happening right now with regard to the growth in mobile communications and computing. Massive change is occurring and the superstars of a mere few years ago are looking tired and dated. In fact ‘hero to zero’ has never been so easy. Just ask Nokia, or indeed Blackberry…. but of them more later.

Everyone can see that the market for mobile communications is growing. What is less easily grasped is the sheer scale of this growth, and the transformational effect is it having on how we ‘work, rest and play’. Take the graph below: it shows the amount of data traveling over mobile networks per month. Last year saw 77% growth, which is impressive. But nothing compared to the predicted 13 fold growth from 2012-2017.

This isn’t incremental growth it is exponential. And will be transformational. How could it not be? Think of anything that increases by 13 times in five years. Things aren’t the same are they? Or even ‘more of the same’. No, they are different.

Even in the last few years, when we are only in the foothills of this growth step changes have occurred. For example:

1. In the US the average length of a call has halved since 2005, to around 90 seconds.

2. Watching video via mobile has grown 262% in the last year (more than 50% of total traffic)

3. Amazon has seen mobile use grow 87% in the last year.

4. johnlewis.com sales soared 41 per cent to £959 million in 2012 and accounted for a quarter of trade.

5. LinkedIn has 225,000,000 registered users.

6. Retail vacancy rate nearly 15%

7. UK online sales rise to 12% of total market.

8. UK Internet economy contributes 8.3% of GDP; larger than construction!

Or consider bandwidth and wifi availability:

1. High speed wifi is now available on the London Underground

2. Groups like B4RN are installing Gigabyte (yes Gigabyte) connectivity to rural areas

3. EE and others now rolling out 4G nationwide. Average speed set to double (to 20mb +) this summer

In sum we are moving fast (though with a more ‘wired’ government we could move much faster) towards ubiquitous high speed connectivity, on the back of what seems to be unlimited demand.

Now, what are people going to do with all this connectivity? Well, we can see that they’re not going to be making more phone calls. No, what they are going to do will be shaped by a whole industry taking advantage of this growth in connectivity, combined with ever more powerful mobile devices and the rise of Cloud computing*. So you can expect a plethora of services based on:

1. Cloud based data storage (All docs & images:Large or small, always available)

2. Cloud based applications (SAAS, CRM, Project Mgt, Sales Pipeline, Helpdesk, Building Mgmt)

3. Location aware services (Offers, What’s On, Map based real estate databases)

4. Context aware services (What you need at particular times)

5. Social applications – Business and Personal (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn)

Taking just one example, Google Now (http://www.google.co.uk/landing/now/), we can see where this megatrend is going. This service is now available on Android (owned of course by Google) and Apple’s iOS and offers ‘The right information at just the right time’. So if you are taking a flight it will pull through realtime departure information, as well as having your digital boarding card ready. Or if you have an appointment it will check the traffic and notify you when you should leave based on this. It can provide realtime language translation, give you currency conversion rates and help you book a restaurant or hotel.

In short Google Now is starting to deliver on Sergey Brin’s aim to give you the information you need just before you need it. In other words predictive search.

Why does this all matter? Why should anyone in Commercial Property care? For two fundamental reasons:

1. This megatrend should enable you to do your job better. You should be able to access, and act upon, pretty much any information you need whenever and wherever you are. Almost without caveat you should be demanding, because it can be delivered, all this information and the supporting applications be made available to you via your mobile devices. With this technological empowerment it is hard to think how you could fail to be more productive.

2. With smartphone penetration already at 63% in the UK and with over 6 million people already owning a smartphone AND a tablet, your clients are adopting, embracing and/or being affected by this megatrend. Mobility is becoming the business prerogative. And with this their use of, and requirements for, real estate will change. No longer tied to a desktop PC, office use will change. Pessimistically it could be that employees simply use the technology to reduce their space requirements but hopefully they take instead advantage of the scope to rethink what makes for a productive, engaging workspace. Either way, that 13 fold increase in connectivity between 2012 and 2017 is not going to leave things as they are.

Which brings us back to Henry Ford and RIM. All of the innovations above have come out of developers building upon the ecosystems around Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms, both of which stretch to hundreds of thousands of available applications. As IDC’s Kevin Restivo says ‘The balance of smartphone power has shifted. Phone users want computers in their pockets. The days when phones were used primarily to make calls and send text messages are quickly fading away.’ The direction of travel is clear, and has been since the iPhone totally redefined the mobile phone in 2007.

The problem for Blackberry is that even with the latest Q10, their mindset is stuck in 2000 and their first love is their keyboard. What they have just launched is simply the best horse cart in the age of the automobile.

Bin the Blackberry. Buy a proper smartphone and embrace the mobile megatrend.

Antony

* The Cabinet Office has confirmed that the cloud will be mandated as the first choice for all new IT purchases in government, as part of moves to push more departments into using commodity cloud services.