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Realcomm: Tell us about your journey. What were your priorities when you
started with the company? How have they changed? Where are they
today? Where will they be next year?

Segal: I’ve been involved with Boxer since the beginning, 22 years ago. In my
current role as President, I’m responsible for technology (both Network
Services and Application Development), and also leasing, marketing, property
management, construction, engineering (including building automation),
security, space planning and design.

From the outset, we decided to build a very vertically-integrated company,
performing many functions in-house. This operations-intensive approach
meant that, from the start, we had to focus on efficiency and standardization
if we were going to maintain quality at scale.

Our technology evolution started in a very pre-technical era: we spent 17
years developing a company culture that was extremely process-oriented,
where everything was documented, and we were used to making decisions
based on information (analytics). Then, two interesting things happened:
one, the real estate industry went into hibernation with respect to spending
on non-essential items. During this downturn, a lot of companies, including
ours, were very conservative with regard to IT spending. Second, and at the
same time, the promise of the first dotcom boom become a reality; software
systems became much more affordable, and users became much savvier
through their consumer experiences with smartphones, web sites, and social
media. So we emerged from a challenging period in CRE to find tremendous
opportunity. There were these wonderful technologies and systems that were
available to us that hadn’t been there before, and the users were open to,
and often demanding, better experiences. The solid foundation we had spent
years building—formalizing our data governance, developing our taxonomy,
and training people how to normalize information—really paid off when we
started applying technology to our processes.

After a couple of years of focused IT work, we have a robust ERP system in
place that brings together our various departments and operational func-
tions. On the horizon, we see not only improvements to that system, but also
the ability to scale and extend into new markets and activities much more
easily than we could without this platform.
Chung: I’ve been with Allied for about a year now. Prior to that I’d spent about 17
years in real estate technology with various Canadian real estate companies,
on both the owner/operator side and the third party fee management side. I
think that’s positioned me well for my current role.

My first mandate at Allied was to come up with a strategic roadmap and to
modernize IT. There was a perception within the organization they had fallen
behind and were not maximizing usage of their existing IT assets. I spent my
first three months evaluating things and determined it really wasn’t that bad,
just dated. The company had experienced substantial growth over the last 10
years but IT hadn’t kept up. It was a tremendous opportunity for any technol-
ogist; like being handed a blank slate, which is rare these days, especially with
a company the size of Allied.

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