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“Major retail Key efforts in ‘16:
destinations are Sustainability. A major focus
one of the largest for Macerich over the past
several years has been
aggregators of people our commitment to the
in many communities. environment. Macerich has
If you consider the a very strong sustainability
approach: It’s a dedicated
types of security arm of our smart building
controls now in use team and woven into the
at stadiums today, culture of the company. Each
mall we build and retrofit
I feel we will need has a team of people looking
to be fast followers. at how we can reduce the
Technologies like carbon footprint. As a result,
JP Jones Macerich is consistently
P Jones is the CIO of Macerich, where he envisions, imple- wearables, advanced recognized for our
ments and manages the technologies of this public REIT access control and contribution to sustainability,
Jwith properties all over the U.S. With over 20 years in IT and facial recognition winning the Leader in
commercial real estate, JP has extensive experience in leading are in our immediate the Light award from the
large projects, measuring and improving enterprise performance, National Association of Real
and finding new revenue opportunities. His current focus at future. “ Estate Investment Trusts in
Macerich includes strategic cloud decisions, smart building 2014, 2015 and 2016, as well
infrastructure and automation, mobile business intelligence and as the GRESB # 1 ranking for Retail in 2015 and 2016. Our IT team
talent management for the future. JP prides himself on the talent has had a big hand in the initiatives that led to those awards.
and accomplishments of his dynamic IT team, relationships held Cloud applications. Much of our 2016 activity was cloud
with his internal business partners, and the ability to get projects related: We moved our data center off premise, and most of our
completed and adopted. new solutions use cloud applications. I know this could seem
late to be outsourcing our data center, but every time I reviewed
What technology and business initiatives were most the options, the sites being proposed were in Phoenix—right
important in 2016? next to my existing data center housed within Macerich real
Just to give you a sense of size and scope, we worked on 200 estate. I asked myself, “How is this an improvement or more cost
projects last year within our IT department. We’ve spent a lot efficient?” But times are changing. Now, with big data center
of time fine-tuning our program management office (PMO) to companies working with established data providers, we could
allow us to onboard projects, manage resources, execute, train take advantage of their integrated offerings. To me, soft ROIs also
and measure adoption efficiently and effectively. About half of need to be a part of the decision process. ‘More secure’ and ‘in the
those projects were on the corporate side and the other half hands of the experts’ are concepts that resonate with me.
were related to smart building technology. Many of our malls Security awareness, improved processes. Like many others, we
are “A” assets, so we have significant technologies related to focused on security awareness and training, with both my tech
shopper experience, tenant services and operational efficiencies. team and our users. We also improved the process and the tools
Our many technology disciplines include Wi-Fi, security, digital of our forecasting and planning flow. Anyone in our industry
directories and parking, to name a few. My IT team includes knows how huge planning cycles can be. We cut our efforts by
business analysts, developers, engineers, and operations/support 50% and it wasn’t so much about putting in a faster tool; it was
for both the corporate and smart building sides of our business. what I call asking the “why” and making decisions and adjust-
‘Data Driven’ was our IT Department theme for 2016—utilizing ments around the answers we got back from the team. Why are
existing data to make more informed decisions and work on a big we doing this? Why is this important? Why are we counting this?
data strategy to determine the concept’s relevance to our com- When you have the trust, you’re allowed to ask the “why” ques-
pany. We found that, for traditional, internal data (e.g., lease and tion. If people trust you and are willing to speak honestly, you
property), big data isn’t that big. But when you think of the oppor- get real answers. So, we shaved 50% off the process among our
tunities for integrating our internal data with our building analytics, IT, leasing and asset management departments. We are also now
tenant data, shopper data, and demographic data, it becomes an Argus Enterprise shop, and were told that we were one of the
big really quickly. Data driven is fundamental in our go-forward first companies to implement and integrate their new Enterprise
strategy, and something we will continue to work on. In fact, some solution leveraging data from our planning, accounting and deal
consider data the next utility for our malls and tenants. flow systems. This is a reflection of my awesome IT team.

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