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Tech Perspective @ The EDGE

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

AND THE CRE INDUSTRY

TINA DANIELSEN
Sr. Writer, Realcomm

Digital transformation is the goal of every Corporate and Commercial Real Estate company, with its proven benefits of
improved efficiency, employee and tenant satisfaction, and profitability. Matching business goals with technologies
that enable transformation—and prove to be worth the investment—falls under the authority of IT leaders and their
teams. With the explosion of new technologies available today, they must decide which meet the demands of their
business model and which may be gone tomorrow. As meaningful data extraction and analytics affects all these
categories, developing strategy is a growing challenge.

We spoke with Cindy Parker, Managing Director of IT at LaSalle Investment Management, and Cheryl Gray,
Executive Vice President at QuadReal, for their insights into the constantly changing world of digital transformation.

CINDY PARKER
LASALLE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT

Cindy Parker is the Managing Director of IT at LaSalle
Investment Management, which operates as an indepen-
dent subsidiary of Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated, the
publicly-traded parent company which also includes the
real estate services group, JLL. She is a global strategist
responsible for defining and overseeing the implementation
of innovative technology solutions to business problems.
This includes shaping IT initiatives, developing IT strategy,
implementing system applications, ensuring availability
and support of the firm’s technological infrastructure, and
managing all technology spend within LaSalle Investment
Management.

Tell us about LaSalle’s technology history and doing the same thing across the world. With vendor sys-
your part in it. tems becoming global in the last five to seven years, we’ve
I’ve been at LaSalle for over 30 years. When I started, the been able to standardize our technology platform—which
company was called LaSalle Partners and it was very allows us to operate as a truly global company.
small, about 300 people. We split off investment manage-
ment from the services piece in the late ‘90s and that’s Have advances in technology allowed streamlining
when I took over as the head of IT for LaSalle Investment in all areas of the company?
Management. Over the last 20 years, we’ve expanded from This is an ongoing strategic objective for our firm. What
a U.S. focus, to having a significant presence in the United we’ve done is plan and implement a strategy for a global
Kingdom, continental Europe, and Asia-Pacific. With that foundation. We now have Yardi operating on a single
growth, our technology requirements grew as well. As we platform, so employees across regions are in the same
began expanding, there were no real global tools we could database, which is a significant milestone. We also stan-
implement, so we ended up with a lot of disparate systems Continued on page 58

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