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A Chat with Andy Fuhrman Chief Executive Officer AgilQuest recently chatted with Andy Fuhrman, executive director of OSCRE, the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate. Here`s what we found out. |
A. I hope no one confuses us! The Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate is a non-profit organization that exists to improve the real estate industry. We take a fairly broad approach in defining "real estate industry" and include all supply chain stakeholders who deal with land, buildings, structures or infrastructure.
Q. That`s a pretty broad group of folks.
A. Yes, it includes architects, engineers, contractors, material suppliers, owners, investors, tenants, building departments, plans examiners, the fire departments...the postal service that has to deliver mail to the building...the legal industry that creates contracts for leases...and financial people, including those in appraisals or transactions or funds. It includes all the people who buy and sell real estate, whether as an investment or profession, and people who use real estate as a resource, such as the federal government, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, General Motors.
Q. What are you trying to accomplish?
A. OSCRE`s goal is to make it more effective for people to communicate and transfer data from one industry supply-chain stakeholder to another. Right now, there are organizations that have developed standards, but they are focused on having interoperable data exchanges with only with an adjacent partner. For example, if we look at the current U.S. residential property market, standards have been developed primarily to exchange property listing between brokers and local or national listing service providers. Whereas in the United Kingdom where the Property Information Systems Common Exchange Standard (PISCES) is in use, they`re just about finished in enabling buyers to locate properties, legally lock in the selling and buying brokers for their commissions, complete the mortgage and insurance process, exchange funds and complete the entire transaction without the use of a single page of paper. No wet signatures or writing checks. The entire transaction across all of the stakeholders is performed electronically, via the web.
Q. So, your goal is to integrate everyone in the real estate supply chain?
A. Exactly. We want people across the entire real estate supply chain to exchange information with all the different stakeholders without anyone manually re-entering the information. If we develop a common data dictionary where dates, times, locations, addresses, building types, and space classifications mean the same thing to everybody, then they can transfer that information regardless of what type of software they`re using, regardless of whether they`re using UNIX or a MAC or a PC. The idea is to be able to move this information around easily, just like we do today with email. It doesn`t matter what platform or email software someone`s using, your message still gets there and they can read it.
Q. What role do you see for AgilQuest in the...dare I say it...the "quest" for common standards.
A. As a member and strong supporter of OSCRE, AgilQuest is currently making a significant impact in standards development by participating in the Strategy and Planning Metrics Work Group where John Vivadelli has invested a significant amount of time and effort greatly influencing the development of the current Space Utilization Metric or "Duration Workspace Used divided by Duration Workspace Available". Designed to measure actual workspace utilization by blocks of time, like months, weeks, days, shifts, hours, minutes or custom blocks of time, this metric employs either electronic tracking of occupancy and vacancies, or can be used with manual floor audits. AgilQuest has been instrumental in this project and is poised to capitalize by being the first application in its class to exchange data with other supply chain applications participating and supporting this workgroup like FAMIS.
Q. At AgilQuest, we see the relationship between the worker and the workplace totally changing. In the Knowledge Economy, "mobile workers" are no longer tethered to their desks. How do you see it?
A. You`re absolutely right. The mobile worker does not have a dedicated work space, they use a shared workspace. With reservation system tools like AgilQuest`s OnBoard, people hook themselves into a room for a week, a day, or an hour. As a result, organizations require less real estate because they don`t have to provide dedicated work spaces for everybody.
OSCRE, AgilQuest and the other members of the Strategy and Planning Metrics Work Group are working to better understand the utilization rates of these types of drop-in work spaces. We are trying to get a handle on issues like, "Do we have enough of these work spaces, or, do we have too many of them? Can we reduce our real estate holdings even further?"
Q. What role do you see OnBoard playing in the move to common standards?
A. A natural fit, we would want to see products like OnBoard be interoperable primarily with Computer Aided Facility Management software applications. CAFM applications are primarily used to track space, people, organizations and assets. I would say to facility managers that the concept of alternative officing is crucial to help you optimize how you use your real estate.
For example, there`s a large consulting organization that`s created a flex workspace. The Human Resources, IT, and Corporate Real Estate departments cooperate on workplace strategies and designs for new projects so employees can work together in a more collaborative type of space. Workers can reserve spaces on an as-needed basis. The feedback from the industry that I`m receiving is that this system seems to be working extremely well. Workers are not always in the office. They`re working from multiple locations: maybe from home, maybe from the road. They can be working in multiple places or come together into a particular building and reserve spaces. That reduces the organization`s need for real estate...and it increases productivity of workers collaborating on a project.
OSCRE is a prime example of virtual workspace since our entire team participates from some pretty wild locations, like at their kids soccer games in the U.K, in elevators, trains, while driving, from hotels in Taipei, home offices and yes, even dedicated and flex workspace.
Q. John Vivadelli is chairing an OSCRE Work Group to define key industry metrics. In our humble opinion, one key metric is room utilization, which OnBoard happens to do a very good job of tracking. Any thoughts?
A. You`re right on target. When organizations manage room reservations they also track room utilization. Then they can benchmark utilization against internal and external organizations. If they have hard, empirical data, that benchmark is more significant than it would be if it were done with manually collected data.
In the end, companies can save a lot of money by reducing the amount of real estate to what they actually require. Whereas before they would have thought they needed 50,000 square feet to house their employees, they find by using flex space that they only need 30,000 square feet. And when they spend something like $30 or $40 dollars per square foot for space that can be a significant amount of money.
