Obstacles slowing your organizations’ proptech progress and how to avoid them
According to JLL’s new global research report, “Transform with technology: Shaping the future of real estate,” six issues are slowing progress as organizations design built environments and workplaces that are more sustainable, healthy, and human-centric.
How can you help your organization overcome these common challenges? We provided the diagnosis of each hurdle, as described by JLL’s research, as well as our own recommendations for how to overcome them.
1. Implementation and integration
“Many companies and governments remain at a relatively early stage in understanding and developing a framework to respond to the new landscape provided by technology, which can be compounded by a lack of qualified staff to implement new solutions.”
Most corporate real estate (CRE) and facilities management (FM) teams are leaning on third parties to help them develop a technology strategy, assess their existing tech, select vendors, implement and integrate the technology, and even handle change management.
2. Fragmented technology landscape
“The heterogenous nature of the built environment means that standardized technologies appropriate across building types and applications are difficult to develop, while many solutions continue to have use-cases limited to a few specific problems or extensive competition, with few dominant market leaders. This results in a highly fragmented industry landscape, making it difficult for companies to find the best solution or provider for their needs, and slower and longer decision times as a consequence.”
Seek a technology partner that can help organizations navigate between verticalized solutions and more powerful solutions built for a wider set of companies.
3. Lack of industry standards
“The fragmented industry landscape and rapid pace of technological capacity across the sector has resulted in a dearth of industry standards across a range of core issues from data collection and processing to software design.”
Because the industry has moved beyond an IWMS satisfying every need a CRE or FM team might have, it’s become even more important to find a technology partner with a focus on integrations and standard data models. As your team moves toward making data-driven decisions, it will become increasingly critical for your data and systems to integrate.
4. Privacy and security
“The requisite strategy, skills and technologies for maintaining security continue to be at a relatively early stage of development across the industry, while the amount of data being generated is set to expand rapidly.”
CRE teams may not fully understand the cybersecurity implications of the technologies they deploy, but their organizations are likely to already have clear processes and solutions, developed for other departments, that they can tap into. Proactively engage your IT or SecOps department when you are considering a new technology and build their processes into your deployment strategy.
5. Rapidly evolving regulatory systems
“The growing divergence in technology regulatory ecosystems has the potential to further fracture the proptech landscape between companies and technologies adhering to different regulatory standards or a required duplication in development to satisfy the criteria of multiple regulators.”
Technology companies with real estate expertise ((and vice versa) are often especially skilled at accommodating facilities-related regulations in the way they handle data and by accommodating a client’s unique (location- or industry-related) regulations. Service providers with this real estate and technology expertise can also point clients to applications that track relevant compliance requirements and help build review of this information into workflows.
6. Overly narrow technical focus
“At the urban governance level, trust, transparency and consultation are critical to ensuring technology solutions are adopted and understood by individuals as well as governments. Notable recent examples of cancellations of ‘smart city’ projects or ‘big data’ projects, such as mobile phone records to investigate travel patterns, have highlighted the need for technology companies and governments to first take into account wider social and cultural considerations before focusing on narrow technical solutions.”
It’s easy to get caught up in all the benefits technology can offer and overlook privacy and cybersecurity implications. However, as exciting as technology can be, we must continue to make people-centric decisions.
Work with technology providers to understand how users may be impacted by the technologies you choose. Transparently present them with the pros and cons of sharing their data, and, as often as possible, listen to their concerns and let them choose to opt in or not.
Deciding which technologies are right for your organization and how to implement them with in a people-centric strategy is a big responsibility. Contact us to find a partner who can help you navigate these complexities.
