E-MailBACK TO THE FUTURE: HERDING 3,000 CATS THROUGH THE WORMHOLE
by Steve Andriole, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium
Recently, I was struck by a solution recommended to a major real estate company, a solution that I had a hand in crafting. I was also struck by how the adage "Everything that goes around comes around" is still so true. While we don't talk that much anymore about dumb terminals or green screens, we do talk about thin clients, server-based computing, and portals all the time.
This Update presents a (true) story that demonstrates where solutions are going -- that is, how solutions are dependent on the overall situation, the "users" of technology, the culture of a company, and the efficacy of a specific technology. As you read this story, note how we used a relatively simple -- but powerful and reliable -- technology to solve a difficult problem: keeping cats (in this case, 3,000 real estate agents) happy. Then we'll turn to some (old) lessons that have been relearned.
THE SITUATION
Prudential Fox & Roach/Trident Realtors is an independently owned and operated member of Prudential Real Estate Affiliate, Inc. It's the fourth largest provider of real estate services in the US, with $15.5 billion in annual sales. The company operates 70 offices in the Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey area and has 900 employees. Prudential Fox & Roach/Trident also contracts with more than 3,300 independent sales agents who work on commission, which is a key issue in the following discussion.
The real estate industry 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 ramp -- until the rollout 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. Now it's common practice to surf the Web for homes and then contact agents for visits.
The agents at Prudential Fox & Roach/Trident were also relatively slow to adopt new technology, but over the past few years the adoption rate has improved significantly. The challenge for the company was to ensure that its agents' use of the technology enhanced, not encumbered, real estate transaction processing. This is another key fact in this story: too much technology would swamp even the most willing technology adopters; too little would threaten agents' ability to compete.
Prudential Fox & Roach/Trident sought a better way to give its mobile sales agents and branch office employees access to the myriad applications, forms, and databases, such as the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), needed to list and sell a property. Specifically, the company wanted to deliver applications over the Internet, which offered wide availability and a familiar browser interface for agents, many of whom are not technologically sophisticated.
Prudential's agents are always on the move and frequently work evenings and weekends to accommodate the schedules of buyers and sellers. So the company needed a way to give 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. But because these realtors are independent contractors and work on computers and network connections that Prudential does not control -- the third key fact -- it was vital to provide security for the company's corporate applications and data. Stated somewhat differently, it would be impossible to control the applications if they were local to each agent's computer.
Prior to the implementation of the solution, the company attempted to deploy and support thousands of agents and office employees with a conventional hardware/software implementation model. Soon after the rollout of this model, however, major problems began to arise. Some of the more troubling problems included:
- 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 scale
rapidly
- The inability to keep ahead of the many
break-and-fix requirements among computers that were
for "personal" use or were used for purposes other
than real estate business
- The inability to manage the process through
distributed but ungoverned management policies and
procedures
In short, the traditional acquire/deploy/support model did not satisfy the collaborative communications requirements of real estate brokers, agents, or mortgage brokers and had to be replaced by one that facilitated the secure connection of professionals, offices, branches, and partners.
THE SOLUTION
The company selected the Citrix access infrastructure solutions for remote office connectivity as the platform to solve the access -- and support -- problems. The technology enables organizations to securely deliver applications and information to remote offices and contact centers and maintain those applications and information from a central location.
Prudential Fox & Roach/Trident implemented Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager to augment its existing MetaFrame Presentation Server environment with secure access to applications and information over the Internet. More than 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 solution range from older 16-bit software to homegrown solutions. They include Know Your Neighborhood, School Report, and PC Forms that are required for house closings.
Think for a moment about the approach. We needed to keep the agents away from the software applications. We wanted to minimize our contact with the machines. We wanted ubiquitous access to the applications. We wanted to control the applications. We wanted to present a predetermined, predefined suite of applications that enabled the real estate transaction. We wanted agents' personal computers and laptops to behave like dumb terminals in a server-based computing environment. This situation should sound familiar on two levels. First, it's like the old days when we controlled everything with mainframe-based applications, but it also feels like the future, where applications will increasingly be hosted (and rented) by software vendors and their partners -- a truly back- to-the-future approach.
Supporting independent agents involves supporting many users logging in from devices that Prudential Fox & Roach/Trident does not own and over connections it does not control, which raises security concerns. The Citrix platform provides several security measures that help the company protect corporate information. The approach delivers standards-based encryption of data over the network and allows Prudential Fox & Roach/Trident 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/Trident 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; the approach offers a consistent and simple interface no matter where the agent logs on. In addition, it provides data backup for him or her. For administrators, the platform enables efficient, centralized deployment of applications and updates. Under its former acquire/deploy/support model, Prudential Fox & Roach/Trident required three times as many field technical support staff to keep applications and systems up to date than it needs after the Citrix implementation.
The whole approach -- and its associated impact -- can be summarized as follows:
- Applications deployed:
-- The MLS real estate database
-- School Report by Homestore
-- PC Forms by pcFORMation
-- Know Your Neighborhood by eNeighborhoods
-- RealFA$T Forms
- Networking environment used:
-- Citrix MetaFrame XP Presentation Server, feature release 3.0, running on seven HP DL380 servers
-- Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager
-- Microsoft Windows 2000 servers
-- Frame Relay WAN and Internet
- Benefits accrued:
-- Shortens the sales cycle with Web-based access
-- Provides data security for remote and mobile users
-- Reduces support requirements by 60%
-- Simplifies computing for nontechnical users
BACK TO THE FUTURE
The initial agent technology support solution involved caring for each and every desktop and laptop computer for well more than 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. Second, the cost to maintain the approach was astronomical. Not only was the company responsible for break-and-fix solutions for more than 3,000 machines, it also had to keep all the software applications current on all these machines. It was impossible to control all the versions of all the applications on agents' computers. Third, Prudential Fox and Roach/Trident wanted to begin to strategically leverage technology to support its agents, employees, and customers. The support model undermined this corporate objective.
The business-technology strategy of the company was to help its agents without requiring them to become sophisticated technology users. The strategy called for shifting control of computing resources from users to the enterprise. Reliability, security, and scalability, among other objectives, were achieved by moving all of the applications to servers accessible 24/7 by highly mobile agents.
These days, everyone's worried about the future role that technology will play in business, especially given outsourcing trends, trends toward technology commoditization, and the growing perception that technology does not create competitive advantage. The strategy of Prudential Fox and Roach/Trident is interesting because change was initially driven by a desire to cut costs and improve service, but it ended up enabling agents to close more deals faster and therefore generate more revenue for themselves and the real estate broker. Did the solution have strategic impact? Absolutely. Was it operationally efficient? Without question. The solution also integrated an old idea -- centralized applications control -- with new delivery technology -- the Internet. The whole movement toward distributed computing during the 1990s and the early 21st century is evolving toward 1980s-era concepts, but with a couple of important twists: mobility and ubiquity, both courtesy of the Web.
The business-technology strategy here was driven by operational and strategic considerations, an objective assessment of the user population, the exploitation of reliable access technology, and a willingness to think a bit outside the box -- or at least a bit like we used to think.