You need a digital strategy

February 2016

It’s 2016 and you need a Digital Strategy. Without one you will not be making the most of the skills that you have, and will be competing with at least one hand tied behind your back. You might not come up against competition who do have a digital strategy in place, but if you do, unless you have a genuinely unique skill, you will probably lose the fight for new business. Human + tech beats human alone.

So what constitutes a digital strategy? Here are 20 starting points:

1. Digital Strategy is not about IT. Digital should not be an add on to your business, it needs to be part of your DNA.

2. Don’t digitise the past. Rethink your processes to take advantage of new technologies.

3. Think: ‘how can I do this 10x faster, cheaper, better.’ Wherever there is friction, seek to remove it.

4. If you were your customer what would you want? Are there digital tools that could deliver this?

5. Update your technology. Everyone must have a great phone, laptop and broadband.

6. Educate yourselves. Read technology focussed business books. Listen to Podcasts. Send your staff on the Google Squared Online Marketing course.

7. Rethink your partners. In a digital world it is easy to collaborate with more people. Who could you work with to bring an extra edge to your business?

8. Rethink your customer. Can you service different markets? Does digital enable new business models?

9. Move your technology to the Cloud. Google Docs, Office 365, Dropbox etc etc – once in the Cloud everyone has access to everything they need whenever and wherever they are.

10. Think data, think analytics. What data do you have access to? Have you ever analysed it?

11. Eliminate weekly/monthly reporting. In a digital world information should be realtime.

12. Automate everything you can. Embrace the robots.

13. The smartphone is your friend. Think Mobile first. Starting with your website.

14. Think how you would outcompete yourself with digital tools.

15. Market for the year you are in. You may like print, but if your market prefers Instagram…

16. Rework your internal teams. No silos. Mix up people with different skills.

17. Get social. Digital networking works. So Tweet, Blog, Share. Talk with not at.

18. Learn about Agile & Lean business methodologies. They’re not just for software companies. Likewise design, service & systems thinking. Then revisit item 2.

19. Look at the technology everyone else has. What is table stakes and what sets you apart?

20. Think about ‘the digital layer’ that sits atop all real estate. Merging the virtual and physical worlds is a key value enhancer.

The devil is in the detail but the broad principles above are what you need to start thinking about. Because, in reality, this isn’t about having a digital strategy, it is about becoming a digital company. Only then will you be able to take full advantage of those soft, human skills the property world is so famed for.

2016: The Lily Pond Year

I am sure you are familiar with the Lily Pond parable. Of how the Lily starts out really tiny but doubles in size every day. So for a long time not a lot seems to happen, the pond looks no different day after day, but then, as if by magic, the whole pond is covered. And the pond looks entirely different. Suddenly the world has changed.

Well that’s how it is in the world of technology. Moore’s Law, the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years, has held for 50 years. And so today we have 1990’s supercomputers in our pockets. The latest iPhone is more than 50 times faster than the original, which came out in 2007. So by the end of 2016, with the iPhone 7, we are likely to have seen a x100 improvement in 10 years.

Similar is happening with bandwidth, storage, WiFi availability, the cost of sensors and Cloud computing. Across the technology industry, improvements are happening at exponential rates. Faster begets faster still.

Well that is very nice for the technology industry I hear you say, but what has it got to do with us in real estate? Our world isn’t changing much; people still go to the shops, work in offices, sit at desks, use PC’s and have meetings. Our industry is much as it was 10 years ago. Before anyone had that supercomputer in their pocket. And anyway, all this change is overhyped, it hardly compares to the 50 years that saw the arrival of electricity, running water, street lighting, the combustion engine and air flight. A bigger screen on my phone. Well whoopee.

Except. This is linear thinking. It’s looking at the world through the lens of GDP growth, a mere few % (if you’re lucky) a year. Which is indeed reality, but it masks the fact that the makeup of economies morphs dramatically even when, in size, they do not change that much. Despite years of hangover from the meltdown of 2008, the global economy is being reconfigured fundamentally. And that is what is impacting on the real estate industry. The Lily Pond is perhaps a third covered; just a few iterations and it will be covered.

So, in 2016 what should you be looking out for in terms of technologies that will be impactful?

First and foremost is not even a technology, but critical to everything that comes after, and that is digital thinking. The mindset that looks at everything around us, and everything we do, and thinks ‘are there technologies that could be brought to bear on this that would make it easier, faster, cheaper, more enjoyable?’. For us as humans. Yes, as Kennedy said, we should do hard things ‘because they are hard’, but there is no need to make anything harder than it needs to be. Humans and machines have different skills, but there are precious few areas where human + machine is not capable of doing more than human, or machine, alone.

Secondly, Virtual Reality is set to hit prime time in 2016, most noticeably with the release of the first Oculus Rift (owned by Facebook) headset. We work in an industry that for much of the time is virtual, in that until we build something it doesn’t exist. We need however, to enthuse and persuade our customers in advance of having anything to show them. Hence the fortunes spent on brochures, videos and CGI’s, most of which are pretty weak simulacrums of what we have to sell. VR has the potential to utterly transform property marketing, by providing immersive, engaging environments that accurately reflect reality, before it exists. 2016 is the year to take this seriously.

Thirdly, if you have not already done so (naming no names), 2016 is the year you must sort out how your online efforts look and perform on mobile devices. So much real estate content is unusable on a smartphone, despite that being for many people their ‘first screen’. UK mobile data traffic almost doubled in the last year. Five years ago 90% of all devices connected to the internet ran Microsoft software, today less than 20% do: to be PC centric in 2016 will damage your business.

Fourthly, you cannot provide too much bandwidth, for your employees or your customers. Ofcom, just before Christmas realised statistics showing how dramatically usage increases online as broadband speeds move above 40mb. Connectivity is the great enabler, the more you have of it the more you can do. And vice versa. The likes of WiredScore are now rating buildings based on their connectivity; below a certain point real estate is redundant.

Fifth, with high connectivity and mobile devices, you open up the opportunity to offer people real time and contextual services. So information or analysis that takes into account temporal and spatial criteria. Truly, what you need to know exactly where and when you need to know it. This is ‘the digital layer’ that sits atop the built environment. The extra data that can help to enrich the experience of a place. So, what is here, what was here, what is going to be here, are my friends nearby, what can I do now, what do I need to know to make the most of ‘the Space around us’? Placemaking was a hot topic in 2015; in 2016 there will be a greater recognition that technology needs to be co-opted to make great places. This is especially true of retail where the whole notion of shopping is moving towards being an experience rather than a narrow distribution channel. The difference between the best and the rest, in retail, is set to widen dramatically and no-one will get to the top without being very technologically savvy.

Sixth, we need, as an industry, to embrace what is possible if we can capture more data from the places and spaces we build, occupy or manage. And that means embracing the Internet of Things, that will enable us to add a myriad of sensors to record, analyse and share information that can be combined to provide insight into how we can optimise our world for the people in it. And then predict (to an extent) what needs to be done in the immediate future to make sure our spaces flex and adapt to perform (in the widest sense) as well as they possibly can. As a by product of making our places work better for humans, we will be more efficient and save money, but it is the desire to be better that will yield the results, not a simple desire to save money.

Seventh, and as a consequence of all the above, 2016 is the year to learn about, and apply, the extraordinary range of machine learning tools that are now available. Essentially these are programs that you feed with large amounts of ‘training’ data, and a set of criteria and variables that are reflected in that data. From there the programs can start to deduce that X = Y, and IF this THEN that happens. Etc, etc. Real estate is awash with data, but still we largely work on hunch, experience and intuition; how much better could we be if we added those human skills on top of far more, more granular and more up to date data? The likes of Amazon lead the way here, even to the point where they are using predictive shipping to get goods closer to people they think are going to order them. Likewise, the burgeoning data driven same day delivery industry will nullify the practise of click and collect as a differentiator for physical stores. Real estate needs data to fight back.

Lastly, 2016 is the year to think about moving beyond having a digital strategy, to being a digital company. That is, a company where every action, process, product and touchpoint, with colleagues, suppliers, partners and customers, is underpinned by an embedded ‘digital first’ attitude, where everything talks to everything else, and where anything that can be automated is automated. Where the whole company works in an agile, iterative way, where teams form and disband as projects start, get worked on, and then finish.

McKinsey recently issued a report saying that “45 percent of work activities could be automated using already demonstrated technology”. Many, in real estate and beyond, recoil in horror at such pronouncements but they should not. It’s not as if we’ve achieved perfection in the built environment. There is so much that could be improved. Dramatically. Recently I heard innovation described as ‘the breaking of constraints’; well, in 2016 the real estate industry should look to leverage technology to break the constraints preventing us building a better world.

What Planet Property can and needs to learn from Planet Tech

November 2015

I joined 42,000 people from Planet Tech at WebSummit in Dublin recently. These are the key trends I think Planet Property should engage with. Within 2-5 five years I believe they will start to seriously impact on the value of your physical and corporate assets.

The PC Era is over. As with Battleships and Spyplanes being perfected just as they became redundant, so it is with PC’s. Microsoft’s Surface Pro is the perfect PC, but the world has moved on. The Smartphone era is just starting. The platform has been built, iOS and Android have won, and now you’re getting an explosion of innovation on top of that platform. 325 million PC’s are sold a year but 2 billion mobile phones. Computing is now reaching a scale an order of magnitude bigger than we’ve been used to. How will this change the workplace?

Think Robot. Robots, at WebSummit, were defined as non human objects that can sense, think and act. And robots are going to be everywhere: Industrial, social, medical, military and domestic versions will proliferate. Think automation. McKinsey reckon 45% of work activities could be automated using existing technologies. How will this change the way we use property?

Cognitive computing is exploding. As exemplified by IBM Watson, which is a platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to derive insights from a multitude of data sources. How could cognitive computing transform how we find, manage and optimise real estate?

Artificial intelligence, in the wider sense will usher in the era of the Intelligent Agent. Think Apple’s Siri, Google Now or Facebook’s M project and you can see how AI is being used to humanise computing. The best interface is no inferface they say; just ask your intelligent agent for something and they will work out how it can be done for you. Of course the human skill is in knowing the right question to ask, but in real estate terms how long will it be before AI is brought to bear on disparate, unstructured data sets to augment the services we can offer clients?

The Blockchain, which is the computational underpinning behind Bitcoin, will be huge in real estate. Already it being used by Honduras to build their first land title registry, but the scope for use in providing trust and authentication in contracts is great, particularly in areas where the rule of law is moot.

At WebSummit everyone took The Cloud, Connectivity and Networks to be basic infrastructure. No-one looks to build single vendor IT systems nowadays. Put your data somewhere authorised people can get to it, wherever they are, make sure it can be utilised whatever technology you or your partners choose to use, and above all, have as fast an internet connection as is possible. How like the average real estate company set up is that?

There truly is a wave of transformational technologies reaching commodity status and they will reshape how the entire built environment is conceived, designed, built and used. The key message is to not approach this new world through the lens of old school thinking; the past is not being digitised but reinvented.

And that is without mentioning the sex robots!

Antony

Essential tech for real estate: Augmented/Virtual Reality

November 2015

Alternative realities were all the rage at WebSummit, and it was interesting to see that various technologies were at different stages on the road to becoming mainstream. In a nutshell, virtual reality is on the cusp of becoming a breakout and big hitting technology whereas consumer augmented reality is some years, perhaps five or more, away from being as good as it needs to be.

Palmer Luckey, the schoolboyish founder of Oculus Rift (though very wealthy after selling himself to Facebook) was explaining that their product was set for release next year, and an ecosystem of developers creating for the Oculus platform is building rapidly. For real estate, fully virtual reality offers the prospect of deeply engaging, immersive experiences being possible. Product demos, marketing, planning and design could all make use of Oculus to finally move way beyond printed brochures. I chatted to a developer of roving, remote controlled camera dollies that were fitted with 360 degree multi lens cameras for easily creating virtual worlds. Think of your estate being virtually available around the world.

The problem with augmented reality is the interface. Google Glass worked very well but you looked slightly mad if you wore them. AR apps on your smartphone can be quite clever but are clunky to use. In reality, no one uses them. For now, save your money.

Video though is huge. YouTube traffic is vast and video works fantastically well on smartphones. As of today it is the best marketing, training, support tool at your disposal. Train your staff to use Periscope, Blab, Instagram etc – video works!

True collaboration is disruptive

October 2015

All change, all change
Collaboration is up there, with disruption, in the pantheon of misunderstood and overused words. We are constantly reading about this or that ‘disruptive’ company where in fact all their are doing is digitising the past and building a better way of sustaining existing industries. Similarly collaboration is lauded as the new ‘must have’ in a business when what is referred to is little more than platitudes about ‘We are one team and we work best when we work together’.

The reality is that, in the sense applicable to a digital business, in a digital, globalised world, collaboration involves the breaking down and rebuilding of companies from the inside. It means doing away with an organisational mindset that has prevailed for decades, based on hierarchies, seniority, process and order. It means blowing up silos, radical openness, embracing chaos, rethinking every touchpoint with customers (indeed rethinking who exactly is the customer) and accepting that, to misquote John Donne ‘our company is not an island’.

Why? Because we are moving from the organisational era to the networked era, and what has worked in the past will increasingly fail to work in the future. The world is becoming exponential, driven by technology, and the old structures, the old frameworks we’ve used to manage our lives and businesses cannot cope with change at this speed. When Uber owns no cars, Airbnb no hotels, Facebook no content and Alibaba no inventory, yet in all cases are worth tens of billions and generate extraordinary income per employee, you know that ‘something is up’. This is not business as usual, these are not traditional companies.

Perhaps you believe they are exceptional, oddities, corporate freaks; that is a position to hold, but one that needs tremendous faith when one understands just how come these firms have got where they are. For the truth is that they are outliers, not oddities, and the depth, richness and reach of the networked technologies they all embrace, and are built on, is now available to just about anyone.

And it is technologies that drive human behaviour, as we reprogram our lives based on what is possible, and once that genie is out of the bottle, and the whole world has a supercomputer in their pocket, the rules of the game change. And hierarchical organisations, with processes honed to perfection over years, managers skilled in the exact replication of repeatable tasks, and closed ‘need to know’ information and knowledge sharing structures will not, can not, survive in this game.

Networks need collaboration
In a hierarchical, traditionally organised company, instruction and information gets passed down from the top, filtered as it flows, to neatly defined departments, dealing with accounts, or marketing, sales, operations etc. What everyone does, and needs to do, is generally known and understood. Do this and that will happen next. The larger the company the more regimented this becomes.

This works fine when you know what everyone around you is doing, your position in the market, and how the industry you are in operates. For decades this has been how business has worked, each year iterating on what has gone before, safe in the knowledge that you’ve plenty of time to work on updates, improvements and modifications. The smart companies have even followed the advice of Ice Hockey star Wayne Gretzky who said ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.’

In the analogue age this was the key to success. But in the digital age, exponential companies are not updating the game, they are changing it, and therein lies disaster. If you were in the taxi, or music, or camera business, for instance, you saw your whole world almost disappear in a matter of a few short years. Even in the tech world itself, Microsoft, once the undisputed elephant in the room, is now but a bit player in the hottest sector, mobile phones. And Google, the king of search that everyone thought was untouchable is finding its market seeping away to the social world of Facebook.

In this type of world, if you company fits the hierarchical profile above (in the opinion of employees, not the board) you need to embrace collaboration. You need not only more brain power applied to fundamental problems, but more brain power used to the max. You need a true network of brains, each with access to the others, and the free flowing of data, knowledge, assets and resources throughout this network. And to this network you need to give overriding principles, not specific targets. Facebook had no plan to become the company it is today, there was no detailed specification. Instead Mark Zuckerberg said “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected”, and then freed and enabled his network to make it happen.

Collaboration works when openness and transparency becomes the natural order of things. When you can access what you need, when you need it and have no barriers between you and whomsoever else in your organisation you need to consult or work with. And collaboration really comes into its own when the underlying purpose of the company is understood by all, and each employee is given the space and tools to maximise their potential, through their own endeavours, with persistent and ongoing feedback and with freedom to roam across skill sets.

All of which is easier said than done, because on the face of it this freedom and lack of structure looks like chaos to many a manager. Without clear goals, and a clear and documented process to reach them, how can we possibly succeed? That though is the point. Running your company in a similar manner to the Waterfall system of software development, where objectives and specifications, in precise detail and encapsulating the whole range of desired functionality, are decided upon and fixed in advance of development commencing is, in todays world, as likely to meet with great success.

Collaboration and agility (the exact opposite of the Waterfall methodology) are blood brothers. Only an agile company can be truly collaborative. Release early, release often, and iterate, iterate, iterate. Feel your way to the solution, and roll with the punches. Don’t guess what will work, see what will work. Put your work in the hands of a customer, see what works, what doesn’t and go from there. As with software, no business is ever finished; life in perpetual beta is the way.

Making your business agile and collaborative means there are no silos. Teams will form and disband as needs must. No more marketing sits here, IT over there and operations somewhere else entirely. All your business issues involve all your capabilities, in different measures, working as one, in parallel not sequentially, Every service you provide, every product you make, every touch point you have with every stakeholder in your ecosystem can be made better, bit by bit, by a collaborative team of diverse skills and capabilities working their way from chaos to order. And back again. Over and over. You are transforming your business, not solving discrete technical problems.

True collaboration is a mindset. One of trust, openness, respect, curiosity, imagination and ambition. In reality, most companies will substitute a bit more communication for true collaboration. They though, will not be the companies the smart creatives (to use Google’s term) will want to work for. The best and brightest want to work for the best, and those will be, indeed are, great collaborators.

Antony

First published in Estates Gazette ‘The Collaborators’ special for MIPIM UK in October 2015.