Analogue thinking in a digital world

July 2014

The robots are coming. Whether in the form of cute little Baxter who’ll handle repetitive industrial tasks, through to the scary Big Dog that walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads, these sensor heavy machines adapt to their tasks and environments. Being machines they are relentless; on and on they go. No breaks, no holidays, no sickness. Increasingly cheap, they are reaching the point where the economics of off-shoring are being reversed. Manufacturing… it’s coming home.

So far so good. For us at least. But robots come in software form as well. All the way up to IBM’s Watson the range of tasks software can accomplish is growing rapidly as a combination of advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence mean, as Google’s Sergey Brin said last week ‘We Will Make Machines That can Reason, Think, And Do Things Better Than We Can’. And therein lies the rub: if your job involves pure logic (e.g. is chess-like) then computers will be able to outperform you, as logic is what they are good at.

So best to become a hairdresser then? Well, no actually. The answer is not to forsake the digital world, but to digitise yourself before you get digitised. Adopting a digital mindset is the way forward. However, that means laughing at digital conferences where they ask you to turn your phone off, or printing (yes, on paper) reports about TechCity, or saving your work on your PC, or thinking click and collect will save physical retail, or that face to face meetings are the only way to collaborate, or that ‘the death of distance’ is a myth.

Being safe from the robots means digitising your complete business, every single part of it, and then working out what you can do that they can’t. Only the digerati can afford to be human.

Antony

PS This article first appeared in Estates Gazette 12th July 2014

Digital marketing is pointless

June 2014

They call that linkbait.

“Digital marketing is pointless”.

Well of course it’s not. Otherwise the headline wouldn’t have jumped out at you and you wouldn’t be here now. Reading this.

Then again, in and of itself, digital marketing IS pointless. If all you are doing is taking an analogue mindset and pushing that out through digital channels then you are missing the point. Wasting your time. And worse than that….. wasting your customers time. Unfortunately the non tech business world, especially via the conference circuit, is awash with ‘gurus’ saying digital just represents a new set of tools that add a bit of heft to your existing analogue marketing. Carry on doing what you’re doing but add this extra layer as a new distribution channel. A bit of LinkedIn, a bit of Facebook, some tweets.

You can do that. And it might be worthwhile. You might well think it is enough. That you have digital covered.

But being digital really is about a new way of thinking, as much as a new set of tools. It’s not something just for the marketing department, not a bolt on to existing ways of operating. Being digital involves rethinking how you work, how you generate business, how you service customers and ultimately how you think.

Two examples.

First off consider how in the tech industry it is commonplace to live stream conferences. For example, the excellent Le Web conference in Paris, or Google I/O or FT Digital. Each of these are expensive to attend, so why are they streaming them? Surely who’d go to the real thing when you can watch for free. That would seem to be the attitude in many/most other industries where conferences aren’t normally streamed, or indeed even recorded for later use. This though is like the lump of labour fallacy, where it’s considered that there is only so much work to go around and if you have too many workers we’ll all go to hell in a handcart. We’ll keep our conferences exclusive and only attendees will glean the pearls of wisdom that flow therein.

This is analogue thinking writ large. In the digital world you realise that scaling up events, by opening them up to virtual participants builds a bigger pie. Indeed a richer, more layered, more inclusive pie. A live streamed conference might double, triple the audience, maybe even way more. And if you have something worthwhile to say, surely the more who hear the better? More important than that though is that industries become less parochial, less like echo chambers where everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. As the scale and variety of the audience increases real world participation becomes ever more desirable.It is striking within the property industry that there seem to be conferences where marketing types go, and others for developers, or planners, or architects, or environmental types. So whereas in reality all these people absolutely have to work together to build a better world, what you get is standalone silos of self selecting conformity.

The second example is the analogue report in digital clothing. Nothing demonstrates the error of treating digital as a bolt-on better than the pdf version of a research report laid out in print format. Too often are the times where one gets emailed, or tweeted, or otherwise digitally linked to reports or research documents that are unreadable on a mobile device. These just scream ‘I DON’T GET IT’. The digital world must be approached ‘mobile first’. Why? Because that is how people consume content. On a mobile device. Or, to be fair, in print. Not sat at a desk.

These two examples may seem a bit ‘oh well, no big deal’ but they are not, because they encapsulate an attitude that means the big trends will be either missed, or misunderstood. Take the current vogue for saying London’s position as a powerhouse is assured because, as was said at #BaseLDN this week ‘Cities are factories of the mind’ and agglomeration effects are everything. This is lazy thinking that betrays an unwillingness to countenance what’ll happen as we move to gigabit broadband, an internet of things, Watson on tap and the rise of mainstream robotics. Cities do have big advantages, but funnily enough the world’s biggest fashion retailer, Inditex, is based in the back of beyond, and neither Apple, or Facebook, or Google (three of the most powerful, innovative companies in the world) have their headquarters in a city. The groupthink that now says that ‘the death of distance’ is a fallacy, might well itself be fallacious. With a truly digital mindset it is not hard to see a highly disruptive future for the built environment. And that mindset can only come from co-opting digital thinking throughout your organisation, not just as a marketing add-on.

Digital marketing IS pointless unless it flows from being a digital business. And being truly digital is where we’re all heading. You may as well embrace it. If only to keep ahead of the robots.

Antony

You're never going to buy a suit online

June 2014

Last week I heard the funniest thing since the IT director of the now defunct Healey & Baker said ‘the internet is a solution in search of a problem’.

It came via a twitter exchange with the retail property analyst at one of the biggest surveying firms. Responding to comments that the @marksandspencer desktop website (newly rebuilt amidst great fanfare) was actually rather poor he wrote that it was good enough and that anyway ‘you’re never going to buy a suit online’.

Now the Healey & Baker comment dates from 1996, so at least he had an excuse. In 2014 though such wrong headed, ill informed, blinkered nonsense is not only inexcusable, it represents a damaging and dangerous mindset.

How so? Surely you protest too much!

Well no. And this is why?

You cannot understand how the retail property market is going to evolve without a deep understanding of how the online world operates. Who is shopping online? Why are they shopping online? What are people buying online? Which retailers are best at servicing this market? What fulfilment options are available, and what demanded? What are the tools available for bricks and mortar retailers to fight off the online challenge? And how will online retailers counter these?

Answering these questions will tell you:

Which retailers are likely to prosper
Which retailers are likely to wither and/or die
How the High Street will evolve
The future of distribution property
What’s next for out of town retail

And on top of that what marketing strategies are required to reach, engage and persuade shoppers to visit physical shops.

Recently the success of click and collect services has prompted property people to proclaim a victory for physical shops. An audible ‘told you so’ triumphalism has been rumbling around the commentariat. See, they say, you need shops to leverage the demand for click and collect.

But this is nonsense, and is looking through the telescope the wrong way.

For example take last Christmas at John Lewis as indicative of what is going on: Sales at its stores rose 1.2% in the five weeks to 28 December with online sales soaring almost 23%.

Spot the trend?

Shoppers aren’t using click and collect because they want to visit physical shops. They are using it because it is more convenient than staying in at home waiting for a delivery.

And as Planet Retail wrote this month ‘Despite the UK being a hotbed for click and collect, only two-thirds of the top 50 retailers currently offer the service. What’s more, only 14 percent offer more than one collection option (i.e. in-store collection, locker, third-party store).’

So imagine the scenario when online retailers crack either same day delivery (or even within a few hours in big cities like London) or delivery via enough 3rd party outlets that it becomes quicker and easier to order online than click and collect.

Then what?

The answer will depend on how alluring retailers can make their shops and the shopping experience. In this vein an explosion of technologies are being developed to enhance the real life shopping experience but these are for a different blog post.

The point is that this is a brutal battle, click and collect alone is no saviour, and technology will be enlisted as weaponry by both sides. To believe that ‘you’re never going to buy a suit online’ when the reality is that dozens if not hundreds of retailers are already selling tens of thousands of them online already is truly a damaging and dangerous mindset.

Who wins and who loses this battle will affect the value of property up and down the country and if you don’t get the importance of technology in this equation then your forecasts are liable to not be worth the paper they are written on.

Now, who wants the argue the point?

Antony

How is technology set to further shape real estate?

May 2014

Last night the London Business School hosted a conference which contained a panel on ‘How is technology set to further shape real estate’? As @emily39 couldn’t tweet as she was moderating the session, and @propertyshe (probably the No 1 real estate tweeter) wasn’t there, ‘sociability’ was not high. In fact no one else tweeted anything. This is after all the property industry.

So I thought I’d have a go at answering the questions the panel were asked. @lbs did not mention a timescale but I am going to base my thoughts on the next 10 years. After all we know that we tend to overestimate the speed of technology adoption but underestimate the impact over time.

So in the spirit of only fools try to predict the future, here goes:

1. How will technology change the way investors, occupiers, and managers look at real estate?
For investors I suspect the key point is that they will have much better data to work with. Through the internet of things the built environment will become a throbbing mass of datapoints and investors will know, in real time, the performance of their physical assets. How much energy is being used, how much is being spent on maintenance (and through predictive analytics how much future costs will be) and all other variables will flow through to cloud based software stacks that will guarantee hitherto unheard of financial and operational transparency.

Future datasets will build on the sort of ‘real’ information provided today by Telefonica’s Dynamic Insights group. They ‘collect mobile data, anonymised and aggregated, to understand how segments of the population collectively behave’. This sort of information makes traditional demographic analysis seem a very blunt instrument. This is what people are actually doing, not just guesswork as to what they might be up to.

Combine this data with availability and stock databases, and throw in Land Registry information (which will become open) and retail planning, for instance, starts to be much more a science than an art.

For investors technology will have a big impact. Though they may find themselves replaced by machines altogether.

For occupiers it seems clear that space requirements will change. Offices, for example are not going to primarily be places where you go to do individual work (for technology will/does free you to do that elsewhere). Rather they will be the place you go to colloborate with others. We are human after all and we DO feed off each others ideas, attitudes and beliefs. But you cannot brainstorm all day, every day; so for most people the office will not be your home from home 5 days a week. Seth Godin sums this up perfectly in his post ‘Goodbye to the office’.

The industry is currently awash with research forecasting ever greater requirements for office space but I cannot quite square this with the ‘Second Machine Age’ as written about by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee or indeed the report from the Oxford Martin School on The Future of Employment which predicts 47% of US jobs are susceptible to computerisation. Go figure….as they say.

For managers (I’m presuming this refers to property managers) there will be less of them (tech/robots WILL remove the need for many), but they will be better educated and better paid. Their job will be to run the technology and make their occupiers happy. Quite what that entails is hard to say but will revolve around removing the friction in day to day activities.

2. What have been the effects of recent online channels (including ‘Click and Collect’) on retailer’s property strategies?
Click and Collect HAS been a big success (British Land say 25% of all visits to their retailers relate to it) but I worry that the property industry is making a mistake in thinking this has let them off the hook and the future of retail property is rosy. I believe the reality is that SOME retailers really get it and know how to co-opt technology in such a way as to actually enhance their retail offering. One thinks of John Lewis or Burberry or NEXT. But many/most are pretty rotten at online, offer little that is not, or cannot be, commoditised and do not have the scale or skills to provide a retail experience that will endure in tempting people away from their smartphone or more likely tablet.

Conversely online retailers are getting better and better at providing stimulating, immersive, addictive shopping experiences. Only the best retailers will be able to compete long term. Maybe, perhaps inevitably, that will result in much better retailers but either way it most certainly will hit the economic viability of many and the knock on effect on the overall retail market surely will not be benign.

3. How is technology impacting the demand for logistics assets?
Not really my field but demand has to be growing, though perhaps not in the way many expected. With the rise of click and collect, the move of the supermarkets back into town in smaller convenience stores and the consumer demand for same day delivery (something Amazon are really gunning for) then I imagine logistics centers will pop up on the edge of urban areas instead of/in addition to a few massive ones dotted strategically across the country.

Whatever happens, expect for deliveries to be SAME DAY in the near(ish) future.

4. What are the impacts of flexible working practices (remote access, hot-desking, business lounges etc) and cloud technology on the commercial office sector?
This was covered above (do read that Seth Godin piece) but in essence mobile technology, in concert with cloud computing and ubiquitous connectivity mean everyone has the freedom to work whenever, wherever and in various ways that is what will happen.

In the world of TMT some of these ‘news ways of working’ are already manifesting themselves and developers like Derwent London say that such thinking is informing their developments, such as at The White Collar Factory.

Whether the attractions of hip, cool, naturally ventilated, high ceiling, tech enabled offices will be able to counteract the already huge rental increases seen in the likes of Tech City over the last couple of years remains to be seen.

Personally I think they will. What they won’t enable though is a start up wonderland to compare with Silicon Valley. This will be mature, knowing, moneyed hipster land.

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That’s enough guesswork.

What isn’t guesswork though is that between now and ten years time the key technology trends already underway will be transformational and will be highly disruptive. When it really kicks in I don’t know, but whilst I believe in the sunny uplands of technological progress I am certain that those who do not get to grips, as users, with modern tech are likely to meet a not so bright future.

Now who wants to know how to tweet?

Antony

Cycling, Property and the Digital Layer

Over and over again I’ve been banging on* about how important it is for the property industry to embrace modern technology. In particular I’ve talked about social media, location services, big data, the cloud and the internet of things. Often this has led to a degree of bafflement as in the abstract these things can be hard to get to grips with. Well, here’s a real world example to ponder.

And it involves the humble bicycle, much loved by property folk. Which is appropriate, as with the bicycle we can see how the physical and digital worlds are colliding. To everyone’s benefit.

How so?

Well first off you have your bike. And once you get started you find yourself drifting into ‘Planet Cyclist’ and before you know it you join a cycling club. And then your competitive edge kicks in and you sign up for an online club like Strava. And this allows you to track all your rides through GPS, and plot them all on real time maps (location services). And then you start to share and compare these with other Strava members (social media). And you do all this via an app on your phone (pulling data from the Cloud).

Without thinking much about it you’ve plugged yourself into an extraordinary digital network meshing together vast pools of information (big data) and massive computational grunt. You are now a digital human. And all you did was buy a bicycle.

In London you also use a Boris bike. And this tracks you via RFID (Internet of things) in order to keep track of the four thousand or so bikes whizzing hither and thither.

If you were visiting the Intel campus in Oregon you might even have seen the prototype Internet of Things enabled bikes they are developing.

So far this is all about you, your bike and your social network. But** with all this technology going on something else is possible, with much wider ramifications. By pooling all the data generated by the whole Strava community they now have access to exceptional insight into how cyclists move around various world cities, something which was never before possible. So they are now selling this data to City Planners, whose job is making a city more manageable and who need all the data they can get their hands on.

Starting off in Portland Oregon, London, Glasgow and Orlando have also signed up. The image at the top of the page is taken from the heatmap of their dataset which includes 77,688,848 rides and 19,660,163 runs representing about 220 billion total data points.

So there you have it. Social media, location services, big data, the Cloud and the internet of things working in real life. The Digital Layer in action.

And the big takeaway from this? The Digital Layer is rich, and thick, and with us now. It can transform everything from the daily life of an individual right up to the workings of our smart cities.

What can it do for your property? How can it excite, inspire and inform occupiers of your space or visitors to your estate?

Antony

* A phrase first used by the way in an advertisement in Punch in April 1936

** I often wonder whether it is acceptable to start a sentence with a conjunction. Seems it is.