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Chung: I was fortunate to come in when I did and put a very mod- Realcomm: Your companies seem pretty progressive. In your
ern IT strategy in place. This included using the cloud, which opinion, what differentiates those that are and those that
I’ve mentioned. It’s interesting, I fully expected to have a hybrid are not?
environment; I didn’t think we’d be able to go completely to the
cloud, but we were. This enabled the ability to be BYOD, which Chung: Strong leadership is very important; so is a strong, profit-
enabled mobility and also positioned us for the BIoTTM. When it able business plan and growth strategy. This allows a growing
comes to technology, I believe your overall strategy needs to be organization to be more offense-minded, especially as it
relatively fluid. Things are changing rapidly, so you can’t look too relates to technology. It helps to have a culture that supports
far down the road. We know where we want to get to, but are decision making at all levels and fosters support and interac-
not tethered to exactly how we get there. tion between departments. Communication is key. A relatively
flat hierarchy, strong organizational strategies, fitting people
Realcomm: We’ve talked to a lot of people and most agree we into the right roles, support for upward mobility, mentorship
have pretty much all the technologies necessary now to programs, these are all differentiators.
manage and operate our companies most efficiently. Tell
us how you’ve seen things change in your organization Segal: The team is the most important thing, hands-down.
because of technology. We have a group of people who understand the benefits of
technology and are actively involved in the decision-making
Segal: Our serious focus on technology has allowed us to do process. We have many, and regular, productive conversations
things we couldn’t otherwise have done. For example, we about what to build, what to buy, and how to measure suc-
have tripled in size in the last four years; we certainly could not cess. Sometimes prioritizing is a challenge, but those healthy
have managed that kind of growth without the technology conversations among passionate team members are critical
platforms that we’ve developed. The information and analytics for buy-in.
our systems provide allowed us to manage and efficiently In a larger sense, I see four factors that determine how
allocate our focus (be it time, people, or budget) to success- progressive a company can be. Two of them have to do with
fully accomplish this growth. We refer to this shift as the move structure: decision making structure and financial structure.
from “management by walking around” to “management by Decision making structure means you have a manageable
exception,” in that it allows us to identify positive and negative
exceptions based on information, rather than by trying to see
everything in person, all the time. Of course technology will
never replace boots on the ground, but it has played a critical
part in changing and growing our organization. As to the
notion that we have everything we need, we occasionally feel
overwhelmed with opportunities, and sometimes we slow
down to absorb new tools, but in our culture the day we stop
innovating is the day we start falling behind.

Chung: Because we are a REIT, reporting is a big thing for us.
With the new data warehousing system we’ve put in place,
we’ve been able to improve the delivery of information
needed by our senior management team as well as operations,
accounting and even leasing. They now have flexibility in
how they visualize information and can integrate it with
other systems to create new reports. One of our technology
goals was to reduce turnaround time for different reporting
and visualization to just two days. We now have the tools to
implement specific metrics tied to the delivery because of this
platform.
We’ve also begun intensifying the buildings we own and
technology is front and center in those plans. Many are in
large urban centers, like Toronto, Calgary, Montreal and are
zoned to develop on top of, creating more density. We’re
just about to complete our first intensification project here
in Toronto, which is about 400,000 square feet. And we’ve
got plans for three more, two of which are around the
million sq. ft. range.

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