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Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors, an independently owned and operated member of the Prudential Real Estate Affiliate, Inc., is the fourth-largest provider of real estate services in the U.S., with $15.5 billion in annual sales in 2004. The company operates 70 offices staffed by 900 employees. Prudential Fox & Roach also contracts with more than 3,300 independent agents who work on commission. Real estate companies and their sales agents face stiff competition for listings and clients. Finding new ways to expedite the complex sales cycle offers an important advantage to a real estate company. Prudential Fox & Roach sought a better way to give its mobile-sales agents and branch-office employees access to the myriad applications, forms, and databases, such as multiple-listing services, needed to list and sell properties. The company wanted to deliver applications and the corporate intranet over the Internet, which offered wide availability and a familiar browser interface for agents, many of whom are technologically unsophisticated. Prudential Fox & Roach implemented the Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager to augment its existing MetaFrame Presentation Server environment with secure access to applications and information over the Internet.1 Independent agents and 900 employees now have a single point of access from any standard Web browser to applications, databases, forms and documents, and tools such as Web search engines. The impact of the remote access implementation project shortened the real estate sales cycle, provided data security for remote and mobile users, and reduced support requirements by 60%.2 The project also simplified computing for many nontechnical users. Perhaps just as importantly, the project has reduced the number of agents that have left the company for technology support reasons by more than 80%. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

ORGANIZATION BACKGROUND

Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors (http://prufoxroach.com/) is an independently owned and operated member of the Prudential Real Estate Affiliate, Inc. It is the fourth-largest provider of real estate services in the U.S., with $15.5 billion in annual sales. The company operates 70 offices in the Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey area; there are 900 employees. Prudential Fox & Roach also contracts with more than 3,300 independent sales agents who work on commission.

The company was founded in 1886. The company is a full-service or real estate "solutions provider." The value proposition is wrapped around services-for buying, selling, renting, or relocating-and reach-through its offices and sales associates and the larger Prudential network with over 1,400 national offices and 40,000 sales associates throughout the United States and Canada. Prudential Fox Roach also offers financing, settlement, and insurance through The Trident Group (http://www.thetridentgroup.com/).

According to the company's mission statement:

Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors/Trident Group is an innovative, home-related services company that dominates the markets we serve. We are a powerful team dedicated to providing the highest quality service and holding ourselves to a standard of excellence. Our relationships with our clients, sales associates, employees, strategic partners, and the communities we serve are built on trust and integrity.

SETTING THE STAGE

Up until the mid- to late 1990s, the processes that optimized production, sales, and service, including real estate processes, were relatively well bounded, with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Today those processes are extended and continuous. One way to think about the change is to contrast discrete transactions with continuous ones (Alcaly, 2003; Malone, 2004; Smith & Fingar, 2003). Discrete transactions like selling insurance policies, buying disk drives to be included in PC manufacturing, or buying or selling stock, used to be transactions that one could begin in the morning and complete by afternoon or the next morning after running a transaction "batch." Today these transactions are continuous: one insurance policy is blended with another; cross- and up-selling-the desire to sell existing customers additional (and more expensive) products and services-are continuous goals; disk drive acquisition is integrated into PC manufacturing; and buying and selling stock is simultaneously linked to tax calculators and estate planners. Real estate professionals simultaneously sell homes, mortgages, and insurance; some of them even sell (and resell) home decorating, nanny, and shopping services; and they do all of this selling using digital technology at some point or another in the sales cycle. For example, socalled full-service real estate companies will list the house with the multiple listing service (MLS); advertise the house; offer open houses over weekends; help find financing; organize the settlement process; find vendors to perform whatever repairs are necessary; provide data about local and regional schools; and provide names of approved babysitters, and the names, addresses, and references for electricians, plumbers, and landscapers. Much of this is done using databases that the full-service realtor has developed over time; much of the communication is through email or through access to the company's Web site, which has a password-protected portal for customers.

Connectivity among employees, suppliers, customers, and partners, though far from complete, is enabling interactive customer relationships, integrated supply chains, and the business analytics that permit real-time adjustments to inventory, distribution, and pricing. The net effect is that time and distance have been compressed, and speed and agility have been accelerated. Perhaps no other market has experienced this compression more than real estate, which in some parts of the United States has seen price increases of over 500% during the last 5 years. In addition, the average number of days that houses stay on the market before sale has decreased by 50% in many markets. Some markets see houses selling in a matter of days or weeks rather than months, which was the norm in the 1980s and 1990s.

Figure 1 suggests what the overall trends look like and how transaction processing is increasingly enabled by communications, applications, security, and data. The red zone is of course where companies should not spend money; the green zone represents business technology optimization. Figure 1 further suggests that companies should invest to enhance collaboration among their employees, suppliers, and customers, and that their technology investment objectives should be defined around the extent to which their technology integrates and interoperates (to best support collaboration transaction processing).

The challenge is to define collaborative processes that improve efficiency, reduce cost, improve profitability, and increase market share. Our first steps toward employer/employee collaboration were enabled by e-mail and other workflow applications, but the story got interesting when we launched intranets, which were early internal portals to applications, data, news, benefits, operational processes, and communication (Andriole, 2005). Many companies built intranets to solve internal collaboration problems. Instant updates, immediate communication, and continuous documentation are all enabled with intranet technology.

The concept can be extended to customers and suppliers (Lee, 2004; Liker & Choi, 2004; Sloane, 2004). Obviously, this does not mean that companies will only touch their customers digitally, but that digital contact represents another way to stimulate and serve them. Convenience, from a customers' perspective, is the reward here; from a business perspective, it is costeffectiveness, and a way to extend communication with customers: communication that can be used to please them, up-sell them, and cross-sell them. In the real estate business, customers look for all sorts of property; the suppliers to the process are sellers, mortgage brokers, and other providers that support the pre- and post- real estate transaction-processing process.

Like all of the collaboration-driven business models, human collaboration is a process before it is a technology (Hansen & Nohira, 2004; McClellan, 2004). Customers, suppliers, employees, and partners all have "life cycles" that define how to monetize the relationships companies maintain with them. The sales and marketing expression of "cradle-to-grave" summarizes the approach. The objective is to become a full-service partner with this diverse group for as long as possible.

In the real estate world, it is all about seller data, customer data, and matching this data with the specifics of each transaction. In order to do this, real estate brokers and agents must have immediate and reliable access to data, processes, required forms, and information about regulatory requirements and changes. The "life cycle" concept is especially relevant to real estate customers, since a typical customer will buy and sell several homes, purchase several mortgages, and in the process obtain a great number of supporting services, like home inspection and insurance. Real estate buyers and sellers are near-perfect lifelong customers.

Collaboration has given rise to a whole new set of processing and communications requirements including those driven by changes in business models, processes, and communications devices such as (Andriole, 2003; Malone, 2004):

* Changing work models and processes, including:

* Telecommuting

* Mobile computing

* Small office/home office (SOHO) computing

* New customer, employee, supplier and marketplace connections (B2B, B2C, B2E, etc.)

* Letters, phones, faxes, face-to-face; online and off-line, synchronous and asynchronous communications

* Near real-time comparisons of vendor products and services

* Disintermediation and reintermediation

* "Whole employee management" and "whole customer management"

* Multipurpose access points: wired and wireless PCs, laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), smart cell phones, network computers, kiosks, local area networks, virtual private networks, wide area networks and the World Wide Web

* Anytime, anyplace information sharing

These requirements are driving a whole new generation of communication technologies and products as well as communication architectures and infrastructures, resulting in the need for more bandwidth (and bandwidth management), access points, security, reliability, scalability, and distributed systems management. This last area is especially relevant to the case described here: the challenge at Prudential Fox & Roach was to keep everyone linked in a network of sellers, buyers, brokers, agents, forms, and regulations, where no one has to worry about the management of the networks, the applications, or the communications devices. The challenge thus reduced to "How do we connect all of our stakeholders 24/7, reliably, securely, and cost-effectively?"

The use of intranets and extranets to conduct internal and external business, respectively, is increasing dramatically. In the late 1990s, there was serious debate about just how pervasive this technology might become; today there is no debate about the ultimate outcome. Whole aspects of many businesses will move completely to the Internet, just as those-like Amazon and eBay-will grow comfortably, existing only on the World Wide Web. Notwithstanding the expansion of intranets, companies of all sizes and from all vertical industries will continue to rely heavily upon e-mail and messaging, workflow tools, and groupware.

The real estate world has been relatively conservative in its exploitation of the Web and the online processes that Web-based applications enable. Companies like Lending Tree were actually established in the mid- to late 1990s, but their early revenues were slow to grow, until the roll out of broadband communications accelerated well into the general population. Real estate consumers (buyers and sellers) were also slow to embrace the Web, until it became relatively easy to list or find homes via the Web sites of specific or general-purpose realtors (such as Prufoxroach.com and Realtor.com, respectively). Now it is common practice to surf the Web for homes and then contact agents for visits, and for companies to troll for buyers and sellers via the Web sites of related and unrelated sites.

The agents at Prudential Fox & Roach were also relatively slow to adopt new technology, but since 2002, the adoption rate has skyrocketed. The challenge for the company was to make sure that their agents' use of the technology enhanced, not encumbered, all aspects of real estate transaction processing.

CASE DESCRIPTION

In the hot real estate market since the year 2000, with interest rates at 30-year lows, real estate companies and their sales agents face stiff competition for listings and clients. Finding new ways to expedite the complex property sales cycle offers an important advantage. Prudential Fox & Roach sought a better way to give its mobile sales agents and branch office employee's access to the myriad applications, forms, and databases, such as multiple-listing services, needed to list and sell a property. Specifically, the company wanted to deliver applications and the corporate intranet over the Internet, which offered wide availability and a familiar browser interface for agents, many of whom are not technologically sophisticated.

The agents are always on the move, and frequently work evenings and weekends so they can accommodate the schedules of buyers and sellers; the company needed a way to give these agents simple, real-time information access from any location, such as a home office, so they could make the most of their time with clients, and if required, provide quotes or calculations on the spot. However, because these realtors are independent contractors and work on computers and network connections Prudential does not control, it was vital to provide reliable and secure access to the company's and the industry's applications and data.

In terms of the requirements identified above, the real estate challenge proved formidable since it touched just about every type of communications requirement. Figure 2 particularizes the general collaborative communications requirements for the real estate field, listed previously. The problems, however, at Prudential Fox & Roach were wide and deep. The new communications requirements were generating too many alternative solutions. Prior to the implementation of the Citrix-based solution, the company attempted to deploy and support thousands of agents and office employees with a conventional hardware/software implementation model. Soon after the roll out of this solution, however, major problems began to arise.

Among the more troubling problems were:

* The inability to keep the applications that support the real estate transaction process current

* The inability to keep the process reliable or secure

* The inability to allow the process to rapidly scale

* The inability to keep ahead of the many "break and fix" requirements among computers that were "personal" or used for other than real estate business

* The inability to manage the process through distributed-but ungoverned-management policies and procedures

* A rising turnover rate among real estate agents that was, according to PFRT internal surveys, increasingly driven by the nature and quality of technology services provided (or denied) to agents by their brokers: in other words, without reliable, secure technology support some agents will leave a real estate brokerage in search of better technologyenabled real estate transaction processing (PRFT reports that their normal agent turnover rate is approximately 20% per year and that approximately 40% of those agents identify "technology" as a primary driver of their decision to leave the company)

In short, the traditional acquire/deploy/support technology model did not satisfy the collaborative communications requirements of real estate brokers or agents, or mortgage brokers. This was largely due to the relationship that agents have with their brokers. Agents are essentially independent contractors. At the same time, brokers must treat them as full-time employees with a suite of benefits, like technology support. If brokers fail to provide them with adequate technology support (among other benefits), they will find brokerage homes elsewhere.

Given these pressures and problems, the traditional technology support approach had to be replaced by one that facilitated the secure connection of professionals, offices, branches, and partners. The Citrix® Access Infrastructure Solutions for Remote Office Connectivity enables organizations to securely deliver applications and information to remote offices and contact centers, and maintain those applications and information from a central location.

With diverse sets of networks and devices in offices, supporting and maintaining applications and information for remote offices can be overwhelming. Integrating new branch offices and supporting mergers and acquisitions with disparate systems and resources brings additional complexity and challenges. Providing a high level of support to these remote real estate professionals is critical to keep productivity and satisfaction high. Citrix Access Infrastructure Solutions simplify and streamline the deployment and maintenance of applications and information to remote offices, and offer secure communications over any network and device:

* Configure, manage and enable application access from one centralized location, reducing the cost of provisioning branch offices individually

* Improve time to value for business expansion with accelerated delivery of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), sales force automation (SFA) and office productivity applications

* Eliminate the need to dispatch technology staff to service remote locations with centralized applications management

* Use the Internet to deploy applications securely with less bandwidth at lower telecommunication and network costs

* Enhance customer service with centralized business-critical databases

* Protect data with a built-in disaster recovery system, and help eliminate costly downtime

Prudential Fox & Roach concluded that the Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite was the easiest way for it to provide secure, single points of access to its enterprise applications and information on demand, while ensuring a consistent user experience anywhere, anytime, using any device, over any connection.

Prudential Fox & Roach implemented Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager to augment its existing MetaFrame Presentation Server environment with secure access to applications and information over the Internet.3 Over 3,000 independent agents and 900 employees now use a single point of access to multiple applications, databases, forms, and documents, and tools such as Web search engines from any standard Web browser. Applications deployed via the Citrix solution range from older 16-bit software to "homegrown" solutions. They include Neighborhood Locator, School Report, and PC Forms that are required for house closings.

A real estate transaction can be a lengthy process. By giving agents flexible Web-based access to all the information resources they need, Citrix access infrastructure helps accelerate the sales cycle and deliver commissions faster. The MetaFrame Secure Access Manager helps the company's mobile sales agents optimize their time and shorten the selling cycle. With secure access over the Web, agents can obtain MLS listings, forms, loan information, school reports, and all of the other tools they need while on the road, at a property, or working from their home offices.

Supporting independent agents involves supporting many users logging in from devices that Prudential Fox & Roach does not own, over connections it does not control, which raises security concerns. The MetaFrame Secure Access Manager provides a number of security measures that help the company protect corporate information. The approach delivers standardsbased encryption of data over the network, and allows Prudential Fox & Roach to provide access based on user roles, so it can control who sees which information. With three main groups of users-corporate employees, employees of a subsidiary that provides mortgage and title services, and independent agents-Prudential Fox & Roach can provide access tailored to each group's individual business needs.

One of the goals of the implementation was to simplify both the user experience and the technology administrator's job. Many of the agents are not technically savvy, so simplicity is critical; Citrix offers a consistent and simple interface no matter where the agent is logging on. In addition, it provides data backup for them. For administrators, Citrix enables efficient, centralized deployment of applications and updates. Under its former acquire/deploy/support model, Prudential Fox & Roach required three times as many field technical support staff to keep applications and systems up to date than it needed after the Citrix implementation.

The whole approach, with impact, can be summarized

* Applications deployed

* Multiple-listing service (MLS), a real estate database

* "School Report" by Homestore

* "PC Forms" by PCFORMATION

* "Know the Neighborhood" by eNeighborhoods

* "RealFA$T Forms"

* Networking environment

* Citrix® MetaFrame XP® Presentation Server, Feature Release 3 running on 7 HP DL380 servers

* Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager

* Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Servers

* Frame Relay WAN, Internet

* Key benefits

* Shortened the sales cycle with Web-based access

* Provided data security for remote and mobile users

* Reduced support requirements by 60%

* Simplified computing for nontechnical users

* Reduced agent turnover due to technology support problems by 80%

The solution is the result of 6 months of planning, and then an almost equal number of months to pilot the technology and then roll it out to all of the agents and office professionals. Over the course of almost a year, the solution went from concept to reality, though there were problems. The company found itself between software releases of the primary vendor. This caused some delay in the piloting and implementation process. There were also some compatibility issues discovered during the piloting phase of the project. But once these issues were addressed, the roll out began, and met with almost instant success.

CURRENT CHALLENGES / PROBLEMS FACING THE ORGANIZATION

What happens when requirements outstrip our ability to satisfy them? We know from our experience that disaster soon follows. The initial agent technology support solution involved caring for each and every desktop and laptop computer for well over 3,000 agents. This approach failed on several levels. First, it was impossible to keep up with the demand. Each time an agent or employee had a problem, the company dispatched a technician. The number of problems quickly outstripped the company's ability to respond. Agents and employees were left waiting in an increasingly longer support queue. Secondly, the cost to maintain the approach was astronomical. Not only was the company responsible for "break and fix" for over 3,000 machines, it also had to keep all of the software applications current on all of the machines. This was difficult since it was impossible to control all of the versions of all of the applications on agent computers. Third, Prudential Fox & Roach wanted to begin to strategically leverage technology to support its agents, employees, and customers. The support model undermined this corporate objective.

In order to solve all of these problems, the Citrix solution was implemented. The initial results are more than just "promising." Cost savings in the support area are nearly 60%, and the number of agents that have defected for technology reasons from the company since the solution was implemented has fallen by 80%. The access solution that the company implemented has solved several problems simultaneously. There is every reason to believe that the solution will endure, and that the access portal that the company has created can be used for additional purposes over time.

[Footnote]

ENDNOTES

1 © 2004 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix®, MetaFrame®, and MetaFrame XP® are registered trademarks or trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Microsoft®, Windows® and Windows Server(TM) are registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

2 Based on preliminary data collected at the company in 2005.

3 Citrix represents a solid solution to the problems at hand but certainly not the only solution available to Chief Information and Technology Officers (CIOs and CTOs). The key is to provide access to multiple applications and transaction processing capabilities in a way that minimizes support requirements for brokerage CIOs and CTOs.

[Reference]  »  View reference page with links

REFERENCES

Alcaly, R. (2003). The new economy. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Andriole, S. J. (2003). Pervasive communications. Arlington, MA: Cutter Consortium.

Andriole, S. J. (2005). The 2nd digital revolution. Hershey, PA: IGI Publishing, Inc.

Hansen, M. T., & Nohira, N. (2004, Fall). How to build collaborative advantage. MIT Sloan Management Review.

Lee, H. L. (2004, October). The triple-A supply chain. Harvard Business Review.

Liker, J. K., & Choi, T. Y. (2004, October). Building deep supplier relationships. Harvard Business Review.

Malone, T. W. (2004). The future of work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

McClellan, M. (2004, October 30). The collaborative effect. Intelligent Enterprise.

Murphy, A. (2002). Achieving business value from technology. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Smith, H., & Fingar, P. (2003). Business process management. Tampa, FL: Meghan-Kiffer Press.

Sloane, R. E. (2004, October). Leading a supply chain turnaround. Harvard Business Review.

[Author Affiliation]

Stephen J. Andriole, Villanova University, USA

Charlton Monsanto, Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors/Trident, USA

[Author Affiliation]

Stephen J. Andriole (steve@andriole.com) is the Thomas G. Labrecque professor of business technology at Villanova University where he teaches and directs applied research in business/technology alignment and pervasive computing. Dr. Andriole was the director of the Cybernetics Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he managed a $50M program of research and development; he was also the chief technology officer and senior vice president of Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. and the chief technology officer and senior vice president for Technology Strategy at CIGNA Corporation. Dr. Andriole founded International Information Systems (IIS), Inc., TechVestCo, Inc. and co-founded Ascendigm, LLC. He is a columnist for Datamation Magazine and is the author or co-author of thirty books in analytical methodology and information technology. Dr. Andriole received his BA from LaSalle University and his master's and doctorate degrees from the University of Maryland.

Charlton Monsanto (cmonsanto@foxroach.com), a 16-year veteran in the IT industry, is currently senior vice president and chief information officer of Prudential Fox Roach/Trident in Devon, Pennsylvania, USA. Previously, he was partner and chief technology officer at LiquidHub, Inc., in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he managed the firm's strategic direction for enterprise architecture, enterprise portals, information architecture, and vendor partnerships. In addition, he led business development initiatives and consulted with clients in the real estate, pharmaceutical, financial services, and manufacturing industries, assisting with analysis and strategy, integration and collaboration, portals, knowledge management, intranets, and elearning. He holds bachelors and master's degrees in information science and technology from Drexel University.