Streamlining a Company’s Corporate Real Estate Technology Portfolio for Agility

Overview & Challenge

The technology portfolio in large corporate real estate (CRE) organizations can easily exceed over fifty systems. Many of these systems have been acquired and accumulated over time resulting in overlapping and siloed capabilities that do not always work in unison in meeting evolving business requirements. This is especially true when corporate directives mandate transformation and CRE organizations find themselves lacking the agility to respond effectively due to their fragmented and overlapping technology landscape. What is needed is a rationalization and streamlining of the technology portfolio with a view to enhance overall capability thereby increasing the value to the organization and simplifying the technology landscape by retiring duplicative and obsolete systems.

Trascent’s client, a multinational financial services firm, offering investment solutions and retirement planning expertise to institutions, advisers and individuals, was experiencing major challenges in overhauling their CRE technology capabilities in order to align with the company’s strategic objectives of: 

• Cloud first
• Net zero
• Becoming a data driven organization
• Smart building enabled organization
• Support for hybrid, dynamic working

Approach

Trascent was retained to address which CRE technologies in their portfolio should be deprecated, maintained or expanded in the areas of:

• Facilities management
• Physical security
• Video surveillance
• Design and construction
• Health and safety
• Digital workplace experience
• Business continuity
• Corporate travel management

Trascent structured the engagement into three main phases:

• First – Inception, Discovery and Assessment
  • Trascent reviewed all the CRE technology systems, interviewed key stakeholders, conducted current state technology assessments and rated the technology systems, establishing what was working well and what was not.

• Second – Future State Requirements
  • Based on the organization’s overarching strategy – moving to the cloud, carbon net zero and moving to hybrid work – Trascent conducted a future-state blueprinting exercise. This was based on assessing where the organization currently stood and examining factors that would get them to where they wanted to be.
  • Trascent also created a future-state vision – “a blueprint for the future”. This offered two top choices and gave the firm an overall roadmap of how to get to their goal.

• Third – Solution, Options and Strategic Roadmap
  • Trascent also gave the firm very concrete recommendations on CRE organizational strategy. Providing guidance, such as avoiding doing technology assessments in silos as well as creating a technology selection and governance process to help focus on the greater corporate goals.

Results

Many enterprises accumulate technology systems based on regional or point-in-time functional drivers. Over time, the overall CRE technology portfolio can become unwieldly with redundant and overlapping capabilities, lack of coherent solutioning and a constrained ability to align technology to business priorities.

As this case study illustrates, Trascent has a proven methodology that comprehends strategy, design, technology, process and architecture aspects. By conducting a multi-level discovery and assessment, coupled with future-state requirements, we were able to effectively create future-state blueprints and roadmap for the client.

This allowed Trascent to show the client how each set of strategic options would benefit them against the backdrop of organizational imperatives.

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