Making the List
Of course, monthly meetings and steering committees alone won’t solve your tech prioritization blues. While tech watchers stress time and again that the driving force behind any technology decision should always be a compelling business need, every organization must determine for itself what those needs are and which ones it deems most important. Many firms conduct a detailed ROI analysis to determine which technology initiatives get funded, but hard-dollar returns aren’t always the bottom line on what gets approved and what doesn’t.
“I’ll tell you what we don’t do. We don’t sit down and compare 30 projects’ ROIs,” says Haefner. “Not only do we not have the resources to do that, but you need to look at process improvement, too.”
Intangible benefits, such as making operations more efficient and providing better resident services, need to be taken into account as well. “We have five rules for any technology project,” says Carl D. Bonner, senior vice president of information technology at Post Properties. “It has to increase revenue, decrease expenses, improve resident or employee satisfaction, or–since we’re a public company–improve our compliance. If it doesn’t do one of those five things, we don’t do it.”
Assigning points for the different needs a project meets, especially those that don’t fit into a clear-cut ROI analysis, can be particularly effective to alleviate the tension of office politics and bruised egos. “You can assign values to things like ROI, viability, risk, and how many people at the company it impacts,” says Figert. “In my mind, there are any number of factors that go into it.”
And of course, that scoring process will differ for different types of multifamily companies. For instance, at Lincoln, Galla says the justification equation for a fee-based manager diverges from that of an owner-operator. “For a fee manager, we make our money on the increase in revenue at a property and not necessarily on a reduction in expenses,” Galla says. “The first thing I look at is what the technology is going to cost versus what type of revenue it’s going to generate at the property level.”
As with any multidepartmental initiative, communicating company priorities and managing expectations ahead of time are crucial to avoiding tension and disappointment among the department heads you serve. At Lane, Haefner says he has recently focused on broadcasting the company’s technology priorities ahead of time to the entire firm.
“You need to say, ‘Here are our top three technology initiatives that we’re going to do this year,'” Haefner says. “That way, you can say, ‘Listen, my budget is already locked down for these priorities that we’ve defined as an organization.'” At the same time, though, as he did for his condo sales team, he stresses the importance of offering a stand-in solution for the business lines that didn’t get everything they wished for at the technology table.
“You’ve got to give them a choice and say to them, if you can find it in your budget, we’ll manage the contractor process for you,” Haefner says. “That’s still going to put some extra stress on your IT department, but at least you can give them an alternative.”
–Joe Bousquin is a freelance writer in Newcastle, Calif.
