I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past month looking at usage patterns and system functionality. One truism has held for every system I’ve looked at – every business overestimates the number of users that actively use their systems. Every one of them. Every system.
Why does it matter? Because when it comes time for upgrades or changes there’s a false sense of how technology is being used across the organization. A small handful of users want the world and everyone else doesn’t want to think about the system. Even those that lead the efforts don’t often use the systems – that’s for their team. But they know what they need it to do.
CRE systems are not organizational level for the most part. Even a Lease Administration system (the building block of all CRE data) is only going to be actively used by a handful of lease administrators in even the largest of organizations. Trying to use a system for projects and tracking becomes an effort in chasing people to input data when they could almost as easily stay within a manual world and not worry about a system at all.
I’m not leaving you with a resolution here but something to think about when you look at systems.