Top 10 Commercial Real Estate IT Issues for 2008

Realcomm recently surveyed our 2008 CIO Advisors on a number of topics from server utilization to staff development and asked what they see as their top IT issues in the coming year. Today's Realcomm Advisory provides some insight as to what's on the minds of the real estate CIO and where IT can play a strategic role in addressing these issues .

In reviewing the CIO Advisor survey responses, there seemed to be an expectation of a general economic slowdown and the requisite drive to increase operational efficiency while providing a higher level of service. The good news is that there are significant opportunities to streamline business processes, further align with the business units, and help drive services that will reduce costs and add revenues to the bottom line.

Here are the "Top 10 IT Issues for Commercial Real Estate CIOs in 2008," (in no particular order):

Virtualization
Virtual machines, both server and desktop, offer a significant means to cut IT costs while "greening" IT operations. Issues pertaining to hardware, provisioning, software licensing, performance, security, and management offer the greatest challenges to the CIO.

Staffing
If you're an IT leader today, you know that locating qualified IT staff (especially management-capable leaders) is becoming extremely difficult. Not only hiring, but retaining and developing staff and well executed performance reviews are essential to today's IT shops.

CRM
New applications are coming to market for the basic contact management (deal workflow and lease pipeline hold promise), but there are still many questions to answer on how we can better manage the huge amount of information in this traditional process.

Vendor Viability
With companies being acquired at an increasingly frenzied pace, the question becomes, "Will the solution I select today still be supported a year from now, and how do you assess vendor viability from both a strategic as well as a financial viewpoint?"

Alignment
Aligning business unit objectives with IT priorities is more important than ever. Are your IT leaders embedded in the leadership teams for various business units? Also, are you maximizing the ROI of IT services by leveraging them across multiple business units?

Global Expansion
As more companies are finding investment opportunities outside the U.S., IT departments are faced with a number of new challenges - from local reporting regulations to differences in time zones and currencies, to name but a few.

Building Automation Strategies
Smart, green, and sustainable have made their way to C-suite conversations, and the enabling technologies are now falling firmly into the lap of the CIO. With the shortage of experienced consultants and integrators here in the U.S. and Canada, where does an IT professional start?

Business Intelligence
Let's face it, more than half the business intelligence initiatives either are never completed or fail to deliver on the features and benefits promised at the outset. Does "one-size-fits-all" apply to an enterprise? Do you "build" or look for an "out-of-the-box" solution? Is SharePoint part of the solution?

Disaster Recovery
If your company suffers a major loss of data, there's a 50% chance you'll close your doors within two years. Recovery Point Objective (RPO), Recovery Time Objective (RTO), business continuity planning, data backups, offsite data replication, SAN/NAS - how seriously has your organization looked at disaster recovery and business continuity planning, in general?

Document Management
Commercial real estate remains the most paper-intensive industry on the planet and, at the same time, offers the greatest potential for paperless workflows. Document and file versioning, indexing, and retention strategies are among the greatest challenges for IT today.

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