In my last Blog entry I wrote that IOT would be a megatrend that would revolutionize building operations by imbedding machine addressable technology in every aspect of the built environment. IOT is not new. In fact the technology has been around since the late 1990s. Gartner estimates that there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the Internet of Things by 2020.
Price Waterhouse Coopers recently published a report, “The Future of Work, a Journey to 2022,” in which the consulting firm developed three scenarios of how the future of work may evolve over the next 7 years. Mike reviews them here.
October, 2015 is the month and year when Marty McFly traveled from July 1985 to the future in the famous Delorean time machine. Thus, it’s a good time to review past predictions of the changing workplace, and to rate their accuracy. Predictions of the future almost always miss the mark. Here are a few of my favorite classic misses:*
In a earlier white paper, The Lease Accounting Tsunami; Are You Prepared to Weather the Storm?, I wrote that users should evaluate the effects of the new FASB/IASB on a company’sdebt structure, debt to equity, and other factors that would be affected by the new standard, assuming lease liabilities would be considered as debt. In point of fact, the FASB explicitly decided that Type B lease liabilities should not be considered as “debt.” However, the IASB which treats all leases as Type A leases or capital leases, does consider these liabilities as “debt-like liabilities.” (Their exact words) As one of my accounting friends advised “The accounting for Type A leases requires IASB companies to record interest expense, and segregates payments on the lease liability into operations and financing outflows per the cashflow statement, which is consistent with debt.”
Thus, US companies will experience less impact from the new standard, particularly as it relates to debt covenants, debt to equity metrics, and capital structures. But US companies with significant international lease portfolios subject to the IASB standard, will see their debt levels increase.
Having split my career between facilities management and IT management, I gained an appreciation of how these two professional disciplines have many similarities, but distinct differences which createpolitical difficulties in many organizations.
Virtually the entire infrastructure of the enterprise combines traditional facilities assets: buildings, land, furnishings, and lease contracts and IT assets: servers, storage, networks, mainframes, and applications. In the last half century these distinct asset classes have become ever more intertwined, interdependent, and fused to create work platforms.
In this morning’s New York Times, it was reported that Goldman Sachs recently consolidated from three floors to two in its major Manhattan office tower. The Times reports that “the changes in real estate have helped Goldman reduce its cost by 17 percent since 2010.” This is yet another example of the value in corporate real estate strategic planning and why I wanted to spend a bit more time on the subject.
In the last blog entry we reviewed how the strategic planning process evolved from forming the planning team, benchmarking performance indicators, and setting priority objectives. Outlined below is what the strategic plan looks like:
So what are the major components of the corporate real estate strategic plan?
