Any "once-in-a-hundred-years" event like COVID-19 can have commercial property owners and operators scrambling to adjust to a new normal. In fact, if we look back over the last 20+ years, there have been many disruptive events that have significantly impacted commercial properties and the associated economic cycles. Y2K, 9/11, the Tech Bubble, Hurricane Katrina, the iPhone, the Financial Crisis and, currently, COVID-19 represent the events that have moved companies toward a complete digital transformation. The most productive workforces and companies are those that can deliver results from anywhere, on any device. Let’s take a few minutes to break down each event and its significance. Y2K represented the first shift toward the cloud. Legacy systems needed an overhaul, and a myriad of new back office applications rose through the late 1990s and early 2000s. The moves from midrange systems to client-server to cloud-based apps was relatively quick. Internet access and speeds increased and the budding work-from-home movement was just taking off. Forward-thinking real estate companies moved quickly to SaaS applications, enjoying freedom from the overhead associated with on-premise applications and the support costs that came with it. Now that applications were in the cloud, documents were the next target. The unfortunate events on 9/11 were one of the signals that exposed the need for digitization of our paper documents. Employees needed to securely and remotely access documents and move through workflows, processes and transactions in a digital fashion. Many commercial property management and corporate real estate companies embraced invoice and payment automation solutions and made the move toward online purchasing. There are companies in 2020 that still process invoices and payments manually, but most winning organizations have either automated or outsourced those functions to third parties. The burst of the Tech Bubble came next and brought with it the real...

Any "once-in-a-hundred-years" event like COVID-19 can have commercial property owners and operators scrambling to adjust to a new normal. In fact, if we look back over the last 20+ years, there have been many disruptive events that have significantly impacted commercial properties and the associated economic cycles. Y2K, 9/11, the Tech Bubble, Hurricane Katrina, the iPhone, the Financial Crisis and, currently, COVID-19 represent the events that have moved companies toward a complete digital transformation. The most productive workforces and companies are those that can deliver results from anywhere, on any device. Let’s take a few minutes to break down each event and its significance. Y2K represented the first shift toward the cloud. Legacy systems needed an overhaul, and a myriad of new back office applications rose through the late 1990s and early 2000s. The moves from midrange systems to client-server to cloud-based apps was relatively quick. Internet access and speeds increased and the budding work-from-home movement was just taking off. Forward-thinking real estate companies moved quickly to SaaS applications, enjoying freedom from the overhead associated with on-premise applications and the support costs that came with it. Now that applications were in the cloud, documents were the next target. The unfortunate events on 9/11 were one of the signals that exposed the need for digitization of our paper documents. Employees needed to securely and remotely access documents and move through workflows, processes and transactions in a digital fashion. Many commercial property management and corporate real estate companies embraced invoice and payment automation solutions and made the move toward online purchasing. There are companies in 2020 that still process invoices and payments manually, but most winning organizations have either automated or outsourced those functions to third parties. The burst of the Tech Bubble came next and brought with it the real...