Peoria Charter Service Bus

If I get hit by a bus…..

Everyday in my training to those on my team, I would repeat certain sayings that I felt were important to ingrain and teach those that I cared about or those that I felt had what it would take to become a good property manager or overall employee. One of my classics was …If I get his by a bus, the next guy will be able to…….

Well the other day I did get hit by a bus (sic) and it did not hurt, it was actually pleasant! The bus that hit me was not moving but parked in a rest area taking a break. I noticed a huge mural painted on the side that stated ‘surf and ride’, but I knew there were no “waves or surf” around there, so I was my normal, curious self and I interviewed the bus driver to find out what this message was about. What I learned was so very interesting. The twist is that the bus has free wifi for its passengers. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words so please view the bus photo in this article, which is a Peoria Charter Bus that travels between Champaign and Chicago, Illinois.

What a fabulous idea! A bus moving down the highway with wifi. How cool is that? I loved it. Of course it got me thinking about how neat it is when a business owner makes a decision to do something unexpected and innovative. The owner of this bus company believes that by providing wifi on his bus he betters his chances of getting you to ride his bus. This is not profound, it is simply good business.

Based on that concept, then why do we as property and facility managers not realize that by providing services, like wifi, or customer service online 24/7 or automated messages, or client document portals, that can really help grow our business? Why are we not running to get the services or subscriptions for our buildings and facilities? Is it us or is it the building owner? Who is really, driving the bus, to embracing technology in our world?

I find it amazing not to find automation or connectivity in every building or facility I visit. When I travel, I look for places with wifi. Why? Because quite frankly, I cannot work or play without it. Yes, I can use my smartphone as a hotspot now for my laptop, but there are times I need to have wifi. Where I work can change in a moment. I need to work where wifi exists, yet I trudge around looking for the service. IMHO nobody has grabbed this space yet (besides Starbucks, Panera, McDonalds) other than fast food, bookstores, airports, libraries, hotels, and (what is left?)….. No office buildings, retail stores, apartment communities, condominium buildings, medical buildings, and industrial complexes, have really embraced this yet. They are just not feeling the love for these services.

In our industry we have to realize that if a bus can roll down the highway at 65 miles per hour and offer FREE wifi service, should we as building managers embrace this for our clients and visitors too? It seems like a basic utility today, yet there are common areas throughout buildings all over America with no wifi, no online customer service, no 24/7 portals of information! It is the same old thing. Call the office between 9am – 5pm, or we will snail mail it to you or if you are lucky we can send it to you via email.

That spells o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-y in my book! Maybe your property can make a statement or get exposure by offering FREE wifi or online everything, 24/7. Maybe your company can make a statement and offer automated services of the basic paper you are pushing now. These efforts can be turned into exposure or marketing events for your property in the marketplace. They say being 1st is so very important. Why not make your property or company step up and take that step?

Alright, so you do not want to be first. That is totally understood. But guess what? You are NOT first in the world, just first in one small aspect of one single industry. Banking has totally embraced ATM, digital reports, cell phone apps, paperless checks, debit cards, and a host of other customer service tools. The airlines are online for everything. You can see your loved one’s flight online and watch the plane in the air, 24/7/365. Almost every single retailer or product you purchase has online services. You are not 1st in the world, just in our small part of one industry.

Try it by taking a baby step. Take one horribly painful task that is repetitive and paper intensive and think of how you can do it without paper or online or via a software as a service application (SaaS). Think of a communication step that you can use with automation. Once you start the conversation in your building or at your company, it will start to gain momentum. I can promise you that once you and your staff get a taste of efficiency or streamline a process, they will never look back. The only complaint you will get is, ‘Why did we not start this sooner?’

If you want to discuss solutions and ideas or a vision to take for your property or company, email or call me and I will be happy to listen and then may be able to make suggestions for solutions that are at your fingertips NOW! Call 312.725.0060 or email Linda@ManagerLabs.com.

Outsourcing of services has been around forever. Are you not outsourced yourself? So many of us are! If you own the property or building, you are not outsourced. Cloud computing is no different. It is simply a cost benefit analysis, coupled with the power of mobility, ease and efficiency. You do appreciate efficiency, right?

In so many cases we are about being mobile and we have not been good about customer service either. We need to change that. Our people and buildings need mobility and excellent customer service. Today it is not there yet. Cloud computing is the perfect compliment to our industry and our corporate needs. Not only will it reduce our overhead, but it will allow us to move faster and be more nimble. This is especially true in the strong need for our industry to increase collaboration and decrease redundancy.

This is certain.

When I read this blog article I knew I had to share it with our readers and PM/FM followers. I thought it would really hit home with our industry. -Linda

Guest Author Blog Article with permission from Toni Bowers and Patrick Gray from TechRepublic.com
Date: November 4th, 2010 Author: Patrick Gray

Surprisingly, a couple years after “the cloud” first arrived on the IT scene I am still hearing IT leaders speak about it with breathless reverence. Even non-IT executives will proudly announce “Oh, we’ll just put that in the cloud” when any technology-related topic appears in a staff meeting. The fact of the matter is that the cloud is just another boring make vs. buy decision, and the sooner those in IT management realize this, the less likely they are to build potentially career-ending plans based on clouds and rainbows.

So, what is “the cloud”?

Definitions of cloud computing abound, but they overly complicate thing. Essentially, the cloud is little more than “stuff outside your company.” That “stuff” could be processing power, storage, networks, applications or any other bit of technical wizardry. When the CIO says she’ll “put that in the cloud,” all she is really saying is she will take something that was done in-house, and do it with someone else’s “stuff.” You might put any aspect of your internal “stuff” into the cloud, from raw data that you store on another party’s storage systems, to an internal application you run on someone else’s’ hardware. Often, the cloud refers to a third party’s applications, analogous to the enterprise equivalent of gmail or hotmail to employees.

The non-IT reader who is now thinking “Hey, this sounds exactly like what companies have been doing for over 100 years” gets a gold star. Conceptually, all the fancy cloud talk could be applied to anything a company does outside its walls. The toilet paper you purchase from an outside vendor effectively comes “from the cloud,” and the same decision making process that you would use to choose that vendor applies to cloud computing.

Going into the cloud is nothing more than a make vs. buy decision

A frightening part of the over-hyping of the cloud is that it has obfuscated the decision-making process for determining if the cloud is appropriate for a particular IT function. Mysticism seems to creep into any cloud-related discussion, obscuring the fact that deciding to move something into the cloud is a simple make vs. buy calculation. If you are considering moving email into the cloud, tally up the costs of the various servers, software and support, divide by the number of users, and compare that to the per-seat fees from various cloud vendors. If you want to get fancy, include factors that denote reliability, security and support of the vendor.

Unsurprisingly, this process sounds very similar to the process that your COO and his or her staff go through when selecting vendors for critical components and parts. Assuming your company produces physical products, the supply chain and purchasing groups are likely loaded with people that can help you make an exceptionally thorough analysis of the various cloud vendors, and apply appropriate rigor to the process. While those in IT may quip that those buying physical commodities could never understand the subtle nuances of the cloud. However, the supply chain deals with production and design secrets all the time, and reliability is obviously a central concern since a critical vendor could hamper the company’s ability to actually produce products.

If you can present the cloud in these terms, not only can you get internal purchasing expertise onboard to help you make better decisions, but you can have more realistic discussions with your peers. Rather than the cloud offering a voodoo-like panacea to every internal problem, other executives can approach it as a way to cut maintenance and administrative costs, or a way to allow IT to focus on more valuable activities than maintaining email servers or commodity functions and applications.

While the cloud currently has near-magical properties with many, like most emerging technologies these will soon wear thin, and will only serve to build mistrust and skepticism of IT and the CIO if they are sold as magical cure-alls. When you can take a rational look at cloud-based services, and analyze the decision to utilize them just as you would any other third party vendor, the cloud becomes far less hazy and much more practical.

Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology. Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies. Patrick can be reached at patrick.gray@prevoyancegroup.com

Well the property and facility management industry is inundated with acronyms: PM, FM, ROI, NOI, MLS, IREM, CCIM, BOMA, TI, LO, LOI, you get the drift. But now the industry is being exposed to terminology and acronyms that the tech world and many others, hopes will change the industry forever. The term is SaaS, or Software As A Service. In other words, an automation that is online and can be called a tool or portal. With SaaS, everyone is delivered the same software via a browser that you use for FREE or with a subscription, just like any other subscription service.

The point of SaaS is to actually provide service that enables you to automate or streamline the current process or method you are using today in your offices and improve service delivery and/or reduce your labor and overhead. For example, we all have heard of Lock Box, Multiple Listing Services (MLS), and Online Banking. Now the next generation of online technology has started with a multitude of products and tools that are above and beyond those traditional shared software, now online, products. The products vary from website portals that deliver template formats for property websites to payment processing and bill paying. Everything consumers have been enjoying at home for years! In addition, all of the Cloud products, such as document storage, email and online productivity applications are basically SaaS services as well. With the Property Management industry fraught with overhead and a multitude of remote sites, SaaS and Cloud should be on any companies radar as an alternative.

It is very exciting to find blogs, such as Software Advice where you can read about the Property and Facility Management industry and its migration to this evolution by our industry with technology. It is about time we get our act together and reduce our redundancy, provide 24/7/365 service to our customers, create standards, eliminate the pain of training, pool our resources, create economies of scale, and improve our accuracy. The author of the blog, Chris Thorman is a member of several groups I belong to on LinkedIn and I offered to share his basic and easy to understand article at his Software Advice blog for software advice to the Property Management Industry.

Consider joining our family of LinkedIn groups:

PFMI (Property and Facility Management Innovators)

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=1858850

–Vendor Bidding Lab (beta) subgroup of PFMI

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2238793

–PFMC(Property Facility Management Companies) subgroup of PFMI

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2644670

Rooftop Gardening

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=143300

Certified Property Managers (CPM Group)
Need to be listed in IREM Membership Roster.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=138868

Join me at Maven Research too: https://www.mavenresearch.com/join/4G4Y4QmB