The Making of an Industry Milestone

On Monday June 9, at the Realcomm conference in San Diego, something quite daring and groundbreaking for the Real Estate industry will occur. Representatives from 10 different companies will take the stage in front of over 200 top real estate IT executives from around the globe, to provide 4 live demonstrations of 3 of 7 new interoperable data exchange standards developed by members of the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE)at Realcomm’s 5th Annual CIO Roundtable.

What makes this particularly challenging is the fact that all participants in the demonstration will have to work off of 3 laptops that they’ve never touched before, hoping that they’ll be able to access their company’s website in order to exchange information from their in-house application with the other participants in their demonstration who also have to use an unfamiliar computer. To top it off, there’s only a 50 minute allowance for all four groups to present their demo’s.

What makes this daring?Have you ever tried doing a live demonstration for an audience? What about 4 live demonstrations in front of a crowd of IT experts? Basically – a high wire act with no net.

And why’s this a history making event? Consider the sequencing, time, labor resources and cost required to complete Lease, Appraisal Reports and Work Order transactions. There’s quite a bit of manual data entry, data re-entry, data scrubbing and one-off customized systems integration required. This demonstration will show how these three high value – labor intensive business processes have been significantly streamlined to a point, this technique of developing interoperable data exchange standards will revolutionize the way our industry does business.

Not to mention the number of new types of business that have never existed before in our industry that are about to be launched due to streamlining the flow of data and ability to connect stakeholders that are using similar sets of information, like Address, Property Types, Contacts, Zoning, Tenant, Floor Area, Site Area, Parcel and so on…it’s amazing how much information can be re-used and re-purposed if you take some time to think about it.

The truly compelling story behind what OSCRE members are doing, is that many of the firms collaborating in each work group are actually competitors, working together providing the rest of the industry with over 1,800 labor hours of intellectual industry knowledge per standard at no charge, downloadable from the OSCRE website. This is their contribution to bring our industry to a much higher level of operating efficiency.

Demonstration participants include:

• John Serri, Vice President Consulting, Manhattan Software
• Mark Ayasse, Sr. Technical Analyst, VFA
• Laurie Green, Director Product Management, FAMIS
• Mike Pascale, Chief Product Officer, Virtual Premise, Inc.
• Derek Anderson, Sr. Vice President, Colliers International
• Dave Sawdey, Director Product Management, BricsNet
• Patrick Craig, Senior Director, Cushman & Wakefield
• John Hall, Principal, Prudential Mortgage Capital
• George Chapman, Managing Director, Integra Realty Resources Kentucky
• Brett Williams, Principal, CJC/The Situs Companies

For more information on the OSCRE Interoperability Showcase http://www.realcomm.com/RC08-SanDiego/programdesc.asp?sid=1916

My apologies to the GlobeSt.com team and those of you who have been reading this blog for not being a more prolific writer the past few weeks. I do plan to continue walking through the supply chain management story in the coming weeks. Each step takes some time to write and time is something I haven’t had any to spare, putting in very long weeks during this Spring conference season.

I’ve appreciated the great response I’ve received from many of you. I try my best to respond to your emails as quickly as possible, given the spare time I don’t seem to have lately.

Regards,
Andy Fuhrman, CEO
OSCRE Americas, Inc.
andy.fuhrman@oscre.org