Daily Reports from the Philadelphia Summit

CEO Prentice Knight, Past Chair Jeff Elie and Chairman Mark Golan were among the CoreNet Global leaders featured at the Tuesday morning Business Session.

At CoreNet Global's 2006 business session, held during the CoreNet Global Spring 2006 Summit in Philadelphia, several new board members were appointed as terms ended for other members of the board. The outgoing board members are: Greg Byrnes, John Igoe, Mary Manning, Simon O'Reilly, Bruce Richards, Joe S. Tibensky, and Leslie Whatley.

The slate of new CoreNet Global Directors - with terms to begin 27 April and conclude in the spring of 2009 was approved, as was the slate of new Associate Directors, whose terms begin 27 April and end in the spring of 2007.

The Nominating Committee considered more than 80 candidates. Although all the nominees were worthy, the Committee carefully chose those whose attributes best fit our objective of achieving a Board of senior leaders that fully represents the diversity of the membership.

The slate of new Directors consists of: Trex Morris, Ernst & Young; Mark Tamburro, Nokia; Wayne Peacock, USAA; Renee Leach, Deloitte; and Ed Noha, Jones Lang LaSalle.

The new Associate Directors include: Michelle Myer, Oracle; Hugh Andrew, Hong Kong Land; and Karen Campbell, Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance.

Opening the session, Nanotech Materials for Truly Sustainable Construction, Keith Perske of Sun Microsystems welcomed the attendees who packed the room with an enlightening introduction to nanotechnology: "the understanding and control of matter at dimensions of roughly 1 to 100 nanometers, where unique phenomena enable novel applications." Perske predicts that our lives will be changed drastically by the application and use of nanotechnology within 10 year's time.

Of interest to attendees, as explained by David Sykes of the Massachusetts Nanotechnology Incentive, nanotechnology already is in motion, and has been guiding corporate real estate for decades. In today's rapidly changing world, disasters, social priorities, science and other phenomenon present increasing opportunities to apply nanotechnology among the wide variety of industries constituting corporate real estate (CRE). This year alone, the federal government has invested $820 million into nanotechnology. On the other hand, private industry is not currently spending much in nanotechnology but private industry investment is expected to triple by 2008. Concluding "this is not your children's revolution but your own," Mr. Sykes stressed the need for attendees to pay attention to the innovations available to the industry now and in the near future.

Does it matter to CRE? R.J. Brennan of IA Interior Architects answered his question with a resounding yes! In order to acquire needed gains, architects and contractors must look seriously at nano-materials. Common building materials such as steel, concrete, glass, drywall, insulation, fabrics, filtration, solar cells, lighting sensors, and electronics all have new, cost-effective, strong, light, efficient nanotechnology alternatives available for use in CRE. Exploring IA Interior Architects' case study, Mr. Brennan presented solutions to furniture systems such as ISOPodsTM that incorporate light, translucent, thin, and insulated (thermally and acoustically) nano-substance material composed of 97 percent air called aerogel.

Aerogel has been available since 1937, and currently used in skylights and exterior glazing. Cabot Corporation's aerogel, Nanogel^TM, is currently incorporated in projects in 39 states and 9 European countries. Cabot Corporation's Jim Satterwhite presented a case study demonstrating how the use of Nanogel in the Worcester, Massachusetts Federal building resulted in lowered costs over conventional glass for a savings of $360,000 in systems cost, $20,000 in energy cost, and $200,000 in HVAC cost.

The Second City, the risk-taking comedy cabaret that opened in Chicago in 1959, has used improvisation to develop groundbreaking comedy for the last 45 years. Funny enough, they discovered their techniques also apply in the corporate world – listening, communicating and supporting teammates.

In an entertaining, interactive presentation designed to help attendees build their public speaking confidence and learn to communicate with clarity and impact, The Second City will help them learn to use a little show biz to excel in their biz.

Taking risks often means doing things radically differently, take a radically different view. This is especially true as we manage change in our organizations.

Speaker David Hurst presented a radical view of how successful organizations evolve and renew themselves, and what managers must do to lead the revival. His practical strategies and tactics for courageous leadership have wide application to all kinds of organizations undergoing rapid, discontinuous change. He has leveraged his experience in the corporate world into a portfolio of highly innovative ideas about leadership, the management of change and the dynamics of organizations.

Hurst's ideas have been expressed in two ground-breaking books. In his first book, Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change, he used concepts from ecology and anthropology to explain how organizations are born, evolve and decline. In his second book, Learning from the Links: Mastering Management Using Lessons from Golf, he uses the theory of complex systems to discipline the comparison between golf and management.

Speaker Jim Young presented a global inventory of innovations that illustrate how new technologies are transforming how we live, work and play. How will the innovations of others impact your ability to compete? Are there new opportunities ahead?

Citing the feared outbreak of Avian Flu in the United States, disaster planning experts at the CoreNet Global Summit of corporate real estate executives today urged companies to prepare for the next 9/11 or the next Hurricane Katrina.

At a panel entitled, "Hurricanes, Fires and Blackouts - Oh My! Best Practices in Disaster Planning," industry leaders cited best practices instituted before recent natural calamities and urged commercial property owners and tenants to establish processes in order to mitigate human and economic losses, and to respond effectively in the midst of a natural or manmade disaster.

Jones Lang Lasalle and American Financial Realty Trust together put in place detailed plans to prevent widespread destruction to facilities in harm's way.

In preparation for the 2005 hurricane season, Jones Lang Lasalle's International Director Bruce Ficke convinced its customer, American Financial Realty Trust (AFRT) to "be a little more prepared," for the storm season to come.

It wasn't a hard sell. With over 1100 buildings in the Southeast region AFRT's Chris Lindberg determined that "something will hit us somewhere," and deployed a Jones Lang Lasalle web-based tool called "4Sight" to help protect AFRT's considerable bank assets in the region.

The proprietary software product helped AFRT with planning, safety, compliance and preparation for what became Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and helped stem what would have been much more severe property losses from those storms.

Ficke and Lindberg urged other property owners and tenants to adopt disaster plans for their businesses, communicate openly and clearly up and down the decision chain, lock in fuel vendors, practice disaster plans frequently and consider the human factor when disaster strikes.

Ian Marlow, President of Gale Global Facilities, which prepares clients for being, "in the eye of a storm," also has recommendations for businesses with critical systems. Marlow recommends redundant communication systems including Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), satellite phones and simple "phone trees," to easily locate geographically displaced colleagues during disasters.

OSCRE's forging ahead.

The Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate, or OSCRE, is fast moving from concept to implementation.

Only three years ago, CoreNet Global launched the initiative to build data and other information exchange standards for the corporate real estate industry, yet it seemed such a broad challenge, daunting in its potential complexity and range.

But the whole idea of introducing an open, non-proprietary asset management platform for use by the entire industry is catching on as evidenced during the Philadelphia Global Summit education session on the topic.

Interoperability across the board is one of the chief hallmarks of OSCRE, and the Philadelphia panel demonstrated tangible progress by focusing on two key aspects of OSCRE: Commercial Information Exchange (CIE) and Facilities Management (FM). Panel moderator Ian Cameron indicated that OSCRE will demonstrate both modules in November at the next CoreNet Global Summit held in North America. "We're focused on getting standards out," Cameron said. "It's about executing now."

OSCRE's multiple industry partners are helping to fuel the actual early implementation. In addition to the fact that the Appraisal Institute's standards have already been converted over to OSCRE's XML language, other players like IFMA, BOMA and the GSA are adding to the likelihood for long-term success. "BOMA and IFMA have high stakes in how information moves," and GSA "is realigning federal assets and tracking them through the Executive Order" requiring optimization of the U.S. government's massive real estate holdings, Cameron observed.

Coupled with the progress being made in building the CIE and FM standards, OSCRE is no longer merely a vision, but has become a real work in progress.

David Kontra of General Electric spoke on the panel. He represents another critical element of the growing momentum behind industry data standards, because it's corporate occupiers who are driving the adoption of OSCRE, bringing with them their service providers in IT, brokerage, FM, and other pieces of the asset management life cycle value chain.

Kontra emphasized another OSCRE benefit: reduced cycle time in transactions. The CIE piece of OSCRE offers "easy access to market information like asking prices," Kontra commented. GE is partnering with CBRE (another early OSCRE adopter) and TRIRIGA for an "outside-in" end-to-end workflow model that addresses portfolio management, leasing and transactions. "The free, seamless movement of data (enhances) our finance and compliance" functions, he offered. Kontra also drew attention to the importance of taking OSCRE global, which OSCRE partner PISCES of the U.K. is helping to do.

Kevin Talbot of CBRE echoed Kontra's point about OSCRE reducing the time it takes to complete a transaction, characterizing this benefit as "greater speed to market." The idea of improving information flow will also lead to benefits like reduced manual data entry, easier sharing among proprietary systems, and better manipulation of data. Before OSCRE, Talbot recounted, "We've been through some painful processes to standardize and to seek (data) transparency."

Cara Immel of Xceligent also addressed the lessening of manually managing and massaging of data in respect to CIE. "There's always been human intervention (in the exchange of commercial real estate data), and it's remained extremely labor intensive." Until now. Immel is confident that OSCRE will create "the ability to aggregate large amounts of data quickly to launch new CIE markets."

The uniform multi-sourcing of diverse data is the ultimate vision of OSCRE's CIE focus and - like the other panelists whose enterprises are fully buying into the OSCRE push - John Smart of TRIRIGA sees proof that OSCRE will also interface with the applications side of the real estate software industry. "There's been an increase in the quality of data exchange," as Smart sees it. "We now have the data in place to produce the XML base for OSCRE to read and write into this format."

Discussion then shifted from the CIE side of the OSCRE adoption initiative to its FM side, mainly from a work order request standpoint for facilities management purposes. Panelist Riaan Van der Merwe of Jones Lang LaSalle used JLL's partnership with CenterStone and Cisco Systems as a prime example of OSCRE's ability "to manage the complete life cycle" of an asset. He cited the transition to "Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) and Application Oriented Networking (AON)" as business models of the future. "The benefits will be minimal data entry, lower costs of managing data, greater ease of data management, and the re-purposing of data for other activities."

CenterStone's Ross Leibowitz further outlined the benefits of extending the use of standardize data from an FM viewpoint. "Through the XXLT technology base, all this is here today," he said. "It's a paradigm shift in looking at our business from an open system approach." This is allowing for the creation of an "end-to-end" process, for the first time positively impacting "the full value chain," especially for companies with multiple service providers.

Panelist Laurie Green of FAMIS said her company "has embraced OSCRE," adding that "we are very eager" to see the day when the words "OSCRE Compliant" are part and parcel to the marketing claims and vernacular surrounding any piece of software being used in the management of corporate and commercial real estate.

The point is already being borne out. According to OSCRE board member Keith Perske of Sun Microsystems, the company recently required an OSCRE-practicing partner in an RFP won by JLL. "It can be an owner-driven thing," Perske related. "It will cause service providers to pay attention to it. They will compete on performance, not on complexity."