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There is an app for just
about everything these days
and office users, while not
demanding it yet, are starting

to ask about more services in
our buildings—which in turn
has us looking for more ways

to connect with them.

Granite’s IT Team

racy and consistency of the billable work orders gener- What technology, automation or innovation trends do
ated. In addition to focusing on customers, we also made you see having the most impact on the industry over
a big change internally by migrating all offices to Skype the next three years and why?
for Business. This was a big change for users since we There are three things we are currently focused on. The
got rid of desk phones and went strictly softphones for first is Digital Customer Engagement. Right now, there is
everyone in the company. no clear leader in the office market for CRE, which pro-
vides everything needed in an app, and we think over the
What are your highest priority technology initiatives next one to two years some clear leaders will emerge.
in 2019 and what are the drivers behind them? There is an app for just about everything these days and
We are in the process of implementing Honest Buildings for office users, while not demanding it yet, are starting to
development and construction, with a focus on construc- ask about more services in our buildings—which in turn
tion and capital projects. This is a big project for us, both has us looking for more ways to connect with them.
in efficiency gain through their bidding portal and in better
understanding of project costs through their native ana- We also see RPA really taking off. Most companies have
lytics. Currently, we are working on the integration to our tackled the big office systems projects and as those sys-
accounting system but will have Honest Buildings rolled out tems mature, companies will continue to look for ways
portfolio-wide early in the second quarter of 2019. to reduce human touch to improve consistency and
eliminate redundancy. Using RPA to automate redundant
In addition, we are working with our Property Experience manual tasks seems like a very obvious evolution.
Teams to automate parking, enabling the gathering of ana-
lytics to better understand how parking is used across the Another trend we see is the concept of Big Data starting to
portfolio. Most of our assets are suburban, where parking make real inroads in the CRE space. Like all things tech-
revenue is minimal and parking ratios are high. The focus nology related, CRE tends to be fashionably late to the
of the project is to analyze in real time how customers are party and Big Data is one of those areas. Through cloud
leveraging parking inventory to get better data when nego- platforms like VTS and Honest Buildings, we are creating
tiating leases and developing new projects. In addition, opportunities for macro-economic data. Where in the past
cybersecurity is a big focus for our group, especially at we were reliant on brokers and other deal professionals
the building level. Last year we completed comprehensive to ‘voluntarily’ enter data in platforms like CoStar, VTS
cyber audits, looking at all things ‘connected’ and identified has ‘real’ data on over 10 billion sq. ft. of deals. Similarly,
several opportunities for improvement. In 2019, we are Honest Buildings is doing the same thing for construction
actively working on remediation of those ‘opportunities’ to costs. As these platforms and others gain market share,
ensure that all of our buildings are as protected as possible. Big Data starts to become real in our industry.

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