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Real Estate Journal — Fall Preview — September 29 - October 12, 2017 — 19C
M id A tlantic
T echnology
By Kurt M. Kalafsky, AIA, Aztec Technology for Business, Love it or Leave it
out, but con- stantly com- plain about the volume of e-mail we receive, most of which is “ J u n k ” ? Many con- s ider the i r W
hy do we consider e- mail as something we can’t live with-
available for business. Some say that not knowing what solutions are available and not
modern technologies has little to do with technological knowl- edge, knowledge of available
“decrease operating expenses and increase productivity,” we hear that all the time. But most
page and work together to overcome these obstacles our desire for greater technology integrated into our commer- cial buildings will remain a dream. Until proven return on investment models and successful case studies of technology improvements and its correlation to productivity within the commercial real estate industry are readily available it will be extremely difficult to overcome the finan- cial obstacles. Kurt M. Kalafsky, AIA is a founding partner/CTO of The Aztec Corp/Aztec Architects LLC. n
Until proven return on investment models and successful case studies of technology improvements and its correlation to productivity within the commercial real estate industry are readily available it will be extremely difficult to overcome the financial obstacles.
Kurt M. Kalafsky
Smart Phone as a critical business tool while others find them to be an annoyance. This is no different in the com- mercial real estate industry, the more efficient they make them, the more complicated they become. Sure, you can pull a new product out of the box and use it to some extent, but without spending some time to get to know the product we can only take advantage of a small fraction of its func- tionality. Time management is still the greatest challenge for most professionals. So why isn’t technology freeing up the time we need by processing all the information we need? Why don’t we spend the time to fully understand these products to get the most out of them? Are we too distracted by the next new shiny toy that we don’t complete the project we started? Do we just lack the attention span to fully execute our tasks? Are we afraid that by the time we understand it something new will take its place? I believe that there is some truth in all of these questions. Most of us are not doing only one job today as we perhaps did in the past. Fewer of us are specialists and more of us have many hats we wear throughout the day. Everything is going wire- less, not just our phones but also laptops, tablets, printers, projectors, routers, repeaters, security monitors… this list is growly exponentially every year. However, most commer- cial office buildings are not yet ready to support full wire- less communications indoors. Landline phones are becoming obsolete as mobile wireless technologies improve. This doesn’t seem to be a trend that is going to slow anytime soon. We have increased depen- dency on high-speed broadband over the last 5-10 years. The implementation of technolo- gies in buildings has always lagged behind technologies
understanding the solutions that are available remain the top challenges in implementing modern technologies for build- ings. Actually, the number one hurdle in implementing
products, or time constraints. Cost is still the number one deterrent when it comes to implementing modern tech- nologies in commercial build- ings. Technology is supposed to
often that initial investment is keeping these projects from getting off the ground. Until building owners, IT departments and property managers get on the same
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