This feature article is in four parts, appearing on this and three additional pages on the FMLink site:
The Future of Corporate Real Estate Service Delivery: Increasingly Outsourced
The Consultant Perspective: Experts See Progress, But Not Enough, in the Service Provider Industry
Service Delivery Comes of Age: Outsourcing in the Era of the Networked Global Enterprise
By Richard Kadzis
The compression of time weighs heavily on corporate real estate.
What was an evolution is now a revolution, with the transformation of in-house management of most all real-estate functions to outsourced delivery of globally integrated portfolios.
But while the transformation began gradually and progressed at a moderate rate for a couple of decades, it’s now hurtling forth at a resounding pace set largely by the growing influence of the service provider.
Certainly, it’s clear that the corporate services side of the industry has followed the lead of its clientele’s globally expanding and more centralized enterprises. They’ve globalized and centralized in parallel fashion with their customers, in part through a wave of mergers and acquisitions.
But it’s also a fact that service providers themselves are accelerating the pace of change, morphing the direction of service delivery from transactional and project-based in its earliest iterations to strategic partner and trusted advisor in its current state.
Change is happening faster than ever before. The convergence of macro-forces like globalization, technology and knowledge work are redefining economies, making the world “flat” as Thomas L. Friedman illustrates.
These same forces are also the key enablers of a much more sophisticated model for managing shared services. They are the catalysts that are rocketing service delivery to a new threshold. On the other side of that door, corporate and commercial real estate are fast becoming integral to the global corporate supply chain.
“Corporations,” explains Rick Bertasi of Johnson Controls, Inc. (JCI), “are looking for global service providers who can rationalize the supply chain.” As a Fortune 50 company, JCI is among the industry’s largest service providers by virtue of its capitalization and self-owned portfolio.
Turning Point
Bertasi, JCI’s Vice President & General Manager of Global Real Estate and Facility Management for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), recalls a key pivot point during the real estate downturn of the early 1990s as marking the genesis of today’s “pretty complex” outsourcing models.
It was a time when corporate practices shifted significantly from “project to portfolio engagements which led to outsourcing as a solution,” he recounts.
Before portfolios, companies were outsourcing real estate on the basis of single project assignments. “It started 20 years ago and continues to evolve,” says Steve Stoner, President of Corporate Services at Grubb & Ellis, another of the industry’s largest global service providers. “Corporations were enamored with their focus on ‘core’ activities.”
Accounting, payroll, HR, food services and other ‘non-core’ functions were assigned to outside suppliers, Stoner relates, yet “real estate was not one of the first outsourced functions.”
But when companies figured out somewhere in early 1990s that real estate could be outsourced, they selected the management of facilities, projects, transactions and leasing as the “four basic components” to the early model, according to John Davis, MCR, Senior Managing Partner for the Fortune 1000 company CB Richard Ellis – the industry’s largest provider of corporate services from a geographic and service line standpoint.
“Growth in outsourcing has been truly substantial,” says William Concannon, Vice Chairman of Trammel Crow, a leading provider of corporate services in 60 countries. “Ten years ago, outsourcing was in its infancy . . . accounts really operated in silos.”
“As it matured,” Davis adds, “both the service provider industry and the corporate real estate industry started to look for companies that could do more than one outsourced function.”
“The business traditionally started on the brokerage side,” remembers Craig Morris, MCR, Executive Vice President for Cushman & Wakefield. The firm was founded in 1900 and is now part of the group of global services providers leading industry change. Morris says the industry was “trying to consolidate contacts and relationships and drive work through a single person. And now it’s evolved into professional services and an outsourcing model that gets very, very complex when you bring in all the multiple service lines the clients require.”
The Road to Convergence
The search went beyond tactical types of services that were formerly managed in house. “The mantra for the last five to six years has been, ‘Let’s do integrated outsourcing,'” Davis offers.
Concannon’s description of Trammell Crow’s integrated platform provides good insight: “We have developed a process/playbook for all tasks and service lines, drawing the best in class from across our accounts. We have a management structure in place – from a COO to the Regional Operations Directors. And, we have geographic leadership that is responsible for both corporate and institutional accounts.”
Bertasi’s hindsight is similar. “We moved from tactical to portfolio, which brought more duration (to service contracts), and we were able to deliver strategic value.”
John Phillips, CEO of Corporate Solutions for Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), one of the industry’s leading global services firms, characterizes it as “a pretty dramatic increase in the outsourcing of . . . bundled services and integrated services.”
“Going back even more than 10 years,” Morris injects, “the really key issue has been a movement from what we would call single point of contact or SPOC type of relationships to really a business partner who understands our client’s business, their real estate, their finance requirements, their regulatory issues, the global market environment and cultures.”
So the model changed from task-based outsourcing to bundling, and even can extend to unbundling, and redefining core focus. This was one of the major assertions of Corporate Real Estate 2010 (CoRE 2010), CoreNet Global’s research initiative projecting how companies are shifting to a globally networked management model.
The mutual economies of scale changed, too. “It’s tough to deliver strategic value on a single-project basis,” Bertasi comments from the dual vantage point of service provider and corporate occupier with JCI’s unique standing as the owner of an 80-million-square-foot integrated portfolio.
New Order
The concept of outsourced strategic alliance management became real as corporations first began buying multiple services from single outside suppliers and then downsized their internal corporate real estate staffs.
Phillips recognizes the ‘in-house’ trend toward small but more strategic. “Today, many corporate real estate departments are very, very small. There are corporate real estate executives who have been elevated in the organization. It’s not uncommon to find (them) today reporting to CFOs.”
“As the business matures and the requirements are much more difficult and the business outsourcing continues to grow in market share, or acceptance of this, the amount of people that can actually understand this, drive this, and be successful at this is reasonably limited,” says Morris.
“Real estate departments (inside the Fortune 1000) are very different now than they were five or even 10 years ago,” points out Stoner.
He notes that one-person departments for large corporate operations are not unusual today, a fact confirmed by recent CoreNet Global Applied Research Center findings. The study shows how internal client relations management (CRM) and strategic planning are the two most ‘in-sourced’ functions remaining today among the mostly ‘leaner and meaner’ corporate real estate departments also engaged in managing their outside partners.
Those working inside for the client companies are “being asked to spend more time with the business units as client relationship managers and less time managing the real estate functional activities,” Phillips confirms.
Outside providers taking on more and more formerly internal functions is one reason that service companies have gone from vendor to partner status with their corporate clients.
The trend is evident within the CoreNet Global Knowledge Center, a rapidly-growing online repository of industry innovations, best-in-class practices, white papers and case studies directly reflecting the changing nature of real estate management. Knowledge Center Manager Jennie Lazarus, MLIS, sees “a thread” of industry content showing “the service provider is more than a vendor, but a stakeholder . . . aligning services to the success of the end-user organization. Because of this symbiotic relationship, outsourcing and in-sourcing are becoming merged through these partnerships.”
Another factor is the proliferation of executives and managers who are coming into real estate from other lines of business, or from other professions.
Enterprise Skill Sets
“The requirements for success have become much more difficult, much more complex, and require a much stronger business person to work on those situations,” Morris observes.
“There’s a trend toward more non-real estate executives in corporate real estate,” says Stoner. One result is that “clients are much better educated on things like the structure of contracts and due diligence.”
CoRE 2010 confirms Stoner’s view that corporate and commercial real estate professionals will need to understand finance, technology, talent, planning, integration and other skills beyond real estate to play a strategic role in their organizations.
Talent itself is as crucial in the knowledge work era to service providers as to their corporate clients. “We are a service company, which means we focus on what we offer our people,” Concannon comments. “We provide significant training, communications, interaction, and growth opportunities in order to recruit and maintain the best people in the industry.”
Morris agrees that one thing that’s changed for occupiers and providers is “the level of talent that’s involved for both sides . . . the requirements for business expertise and aptitude have grown enormously,” which is why Morris and others see a dramatic rise in the number of enterprise-style managers at the senior level both client and service side.
“It’s a high-cost versus a high-value proposition for them and us involving (intensive) management and strategic oversight,” stresses Davis. “We do more than ever for our clients, but we are still very tightly managed by them.”
More diversified talent means a greater ability to manage to increasingly informed and focused client oversight.
“Clients are asking more from us,” Stoner continues. “We’re hiring people with more diverse backgrounds and capabilities while we expand globally, too.”
Concannon gives another example of how the industry is utilizing its expanding talent scope: Trammell Crow has “subject matter experts to support our accounts holistically.”
‘Turning over All the Rocks’
Like their outsourced counterparts, corporate real estate and workplace executives are sharing more knowledge internally, constantly learning about best practices and sharing case studies among themselves and other parts of the corporation. As a result, “Our clients really turn over all the rocks,” Stoner remarks.
As corporate clients gain more understanding of their service provider partners’ business models, there’s a resulting push for meaningful information, observes Davis. Clients “are asking us for a lot more strategic information in a more consultative way.”
As a result, Bertasi reports, “we’ve globalized (clients’) data management.”
Part of the growing push to get more information, and get it faster, is Sarbanes Oxley, at least in terms of the U.S. where corporate accounting scandals led to the imposition of more stringent financial and decision disclosures to stock holders and the public.
The burgeoning information engine that’s being created across the industry is also seen through the rigorous and often costly Request for Proposal (RFP) process that most service providers face. Stoner senses that the recent increase in the time and money spent on corporate RFP’s initially may be “an over-reaction” to Sarbanes. Davis counters that it’s also dictated by public ownership of companies and “the pressures of thoroughly investigating the market” that Sarbanes created.
Informing Key Decisions
But another part of it is based on decision support. Within this key facet of corporate and commercial real estate, both internal and outsourced players can contribute important data culled from inside the corporate enterprise and externally from various vertical or horizontal markets impacting that business.
The provision of key information in real time in support of decisions made by senior management on behalf of the corporation’s business units is the tipping point on which service providers are rapidly evolving from vendor to partner status.
“Our focus,” Davis emphasizes, “is to gather all the information we have, internally and externally, to present in a way through which our clients can make informed decisions to optimize their portfolios.”
Morris of Cushman & Wakefield looks at it in a similar way. “We really focus on defining where we can have the greatest value, the speed of that value solution for our clients, how we share best practices and global data interpretation to our clients.”
This same information can be used by the corporate real estate executive to position him or herself in a consultative manner with senior management in much the same way that the service provider is becoming a consultant or advisor to the company in general, or to real estate and workplace operations specifically.
| Standardization across the Globe As a global company, NBBJ has seen the recent changes to the Service Provider industry on a fairly large scale. “The huge consolidation in business globally and the creation of larger and larger global industries, has certainly changed the nature of the service provider business,” says Scott Wyatt, Managing Partner for NBBJ. “The need is to be able to do work any time, any place.” As client companies consolidate and expand around the world, Wyatt explains, many facilities groups are being centralized for worldwide application, which “requires us to be a lot more savvy around the world and to be around the world.” Many larger global companies want to standardize their approach to real estate around the world. These groups are learning lessons from different parts of the world and deciding which of those lessons they want to incorporate. But, there are differences around the world that hinder standardization: Local market fluctuations, employee education, and culture. “I think that one of the key challenges to a lot of our clients when they try to standardize around the world is you just have big cultural differences,” Wyatt explains. “The culture of the workplace in Asia, the culture of the workplace even in different parts of Europe and in the U.K. vs. the U.S., there are still differences and there are still different sensitivities.” Globalization and information technology has allowed for faster adoption of strategies globally. For example, some long-standing trends in Europe have begun to proliferate in the United States, such as sustainability and corporate social responsibility, as well as the open floor plans that allow more natural light into a workspace, notes Edmund Caddy, a principal with NBBJ, operating out of London. — Megan McCann |
Leveraging Internal Strengths
The JCI real estate portfolio is a prime example. Bertasi relates how the company applies what it learns from managing its own global real estate to case studies that it shares with client companies. “JCI needs to optimize its own portfolio, so that we have some great case studies and applications to take to clients like Ericsson, United Technologies and IBM, as well as our global data management and rooftop consolidation services.”
One of the JCI applications, an advanced technology platform for space utilization management, also underscores the need for innovation in strategic partnerships. “The technology measures it (space utilization),” Bertasi says. “It can track who’s using which space in real time and automated . . . for an enormous savings.” In fact, JCI calculates the tracking tool cost savings at 20 – 30 percent. Bertasi adds “100 percent of that 30 percent is gone cost-wise.”
CBRE uses a deep well of information from its Torto-Wheaton research arm to inform key portfolio and other demand-side decisions, but they take an added tack by arming their field staff supporting 160 corporate accounts with the same information that scopes for internal client metrics and outside market data.
“Our account managers can go to their desktop tool and see what we’ve done elsewhere to actually do that themselves,” Davis says. “We have a real ability to share information rapidly so that we are ensuring as client (portfolio) needs change, we’ve created tools to meet that change.”
At Grubb & Ellis, Steve Stoner shares how his firm is innovating around its account management structure from an information-sharing and decision-support standpoint. “We team our account managers with our brokers, but our account managers don’t sell or broker. They are experts on the local markets who live and work there locally so that they can help the clients to get the most value from their transactions with the brokers.”
Ultimately, information and decision support are the great enablers of strategic outsourcing. “We’re focused on helping our clients to do what their corporations are asking them to do,” Davis says. “We’re linking real estate to business strategies and thinking out to the future, building in flexibility along the way to adjust to changes.”
Cross-communication is one key to success, Concannon believes. “Our accounts talk to each other now, they share ideas and leverage scale.”
Efficiency vs. Effectiveness
Alignment is another key area of opportunity for the increasingly strategic role that commercial real estate firms are playing with their corporate accounts.
“Real estate in partnership with corporate strategy” was an important early theme of the outsourcing era, as captured by the Corporate Real Estate (CRE) 2000 initiative conducted by one of CoreNet Global’s predecessor organizations, IDRC.
The research of the early- to mid-90s gave rise to a concept known as Corporate Infrastructure Resources. CIR, as it was known, was the harbinger of supply chain management and the precursor to CoRE 2010’s IRIS: Integrated Resources Infrastructure Solution model introduced by CoreNet Global in 2004.
“Even then, it was clear an education program would be needed to provide senior leaders with tools to develop a strategic role for real estate,” wrote John Englert, whose CRE 2000 breakthrough work, The Strategic Alignment Handbook, helped define the practice of real estate working in synch with a company’s business plan starting with an internally integrated infrastructure. “Now the need has evolved for corporate real estate to be better integrated with other support services, such as HR, IT, finance and others,” Englert, a former real estate executive for Kodak, summarized for IDRC in 1999.
Now that alignment has been taken to another level by more advanced forms of outsourcing, the tenet might be better stated as “service provision in partnership with corporate strategy.”
Concannon pinpoints two key elements of the new tenet: strategic and international services. He uses the area of portfolio optimization as a prime example. “We even have dedicated strategists on our accounts, rather than drawing simply from company-wide resources.” Citing the Fortune 500 “growth without growth” shareholder-driven paradox, on top of the global outsourcing of call centers and manufacturing by big companies, he insists “we have to first help our clients dispose of space domestically and then grow internationally.”
Davis believes the progression is akin to efficiency maturing to effectiveness. Much of the early outsourcing of basic core functions “was driven by cost savings,” he remembers. “It was driving it then, and it’s still important. But corporate real estate is more than cost savings now. There’s more alignment with business unit strategic objectives.” CBRE is even doing some off-shoring on behalf of some clients as another example of more advanced support models emerging today, Davis mentions.
The High Road
To JLL’s Phillips, alignment also equates to consistency. “To be successful in this environment, one needs to be able to offer consistent quality globally, to link their business together through a common technology platform, to be able to provide strategic, thoughtful, proactive advice and have the people to do it, and one has to be in a position to have a very strong, solid account management platform that allows them to do that.”
Like Phillips, Stoner envisions alignment on a high plain. He sees it as a future end-to-end integrated services platform for Grubb & Ellis to address its key goal of being the best service provider “by adding all capabilities and geographies” to the 109 locations served by the company in the U.S. alone.
He imparts a sense of urgency over the idea of adding value to the supply chain to the degree that, “Way down the road, the model evolves to shared services beyond real estate to include any commodity service like HR, accounting, payroll or real estate.”
That would mark a full circle of sorts for the industry, with the earliest forms of corporate outsourcing involving those other shared services but not real estate. More so, such a step would validate what’s becoming apparent today: that service providers are also more adept at structuring and managing supply chain models.
“Today,” Concannon says, “our company structure is organized in a fashion to cater to our corporate accounts. We can now leverage our scale to the benefit of our clients.”
One example is seen through JCI. It leverages a diversified business mix by applying the principles of its automotive parts supply chain business to its real estate services. But it’s important to differentiate between managing and the actual delivery of services in this context, according to Bertasi. Integrated global solutions are centralized and exist at the management level. “No one will ever self-perform all of the work everywhere,” he cautions.
It’s not uncommon, then, to find a major global service provider subcontracting with locally networked providers with the former carrying out the centralized oversight of the global services supply chain and the latter actually performing the work at the local level worldwide. Third-party leasing is a common example.
“The major service providers are all, including us, invested in creating global platforms,” echoes Davis of CBRE, which has 320 locations in more than 80 countries. “People that are working on corporate services no longer work in a regional organization, they work as an account-managed organization.”
“We have capital to invest in people and technology,” continues Concannon of Trammell Crow. “Our growth has provided us the ability to expand internationally.”
| Industry Advancing Across the Board Industry experts agree: Corporate Real Estate isn’t what it was 10 to 15 years ago. “One reason for the change is the increased scrutiny on real estate in the corporate world,” says Brian Hayes, Senior Director of National Accounts for Opus. “Instead of being an afterthought, real estate has become a much more critical component of the typical CFO thought process.” As a result of this change in thinking, Hayes believes that the corporate client’s expections of service providers have dramatically increased over the last decade or so. But, service providers are keeping pace with expectations. “Everyone is more sophisticated and the number of high-quality competitors has increased significantly,” he says. Hayes also credits brokers and consultants who have seen the need for more accountability regarding real estate and have developed the service lines to meet this need. The industry is advancing across the board to better service their clients. “Service providers are making a much greater effort to understand the world in which the corporate real estate executive lives,” Hayes explains. “The more knowledge the service provider has of the non-real estate issues affecting real estate decisions and strategies, the more effective they become in meeting corporate real estate needs. Understanding logistics trends, workplace issues and balance sheet implications are all important.” Opus has implemented several strategies to meet changing needs. The company continues to expand into new markets, and recently opened offices in Boston to provide a greater presence in the Eastern U.S. and also in Toronto to address the Canadian market. Opus has recruited and developed a National Account team to call on corporate customers and provide a consistent point of contact for them as they address their real estate needs around the country. The company has also made significant and ongoing investments in the accounting, human resources and property management functions designed to create a more robust and ef.cient operating model internally. — Megan McCann |
Information Powered
“Invested” is a key word, because it signifies another element of the global service delivery: the fact that service providers are assuming more risk in direct proportion to their growing investment capabilities.
“Solutions,” Morris imparts, “are more complex whether they’re for emerging markets or global types of service delivery – as the complexity grows, so does the cost to provide that service. It’s more expensive to compete on the higher level.”
Risk is where the industry evolution of the 1990s turns into tomorrow’s industry revolution. Change generated by service companies adds to the momentum created by corporate change. The service side of the industry “has moved in lockstep with the user community,” according to Bertasi. “I do see that changing,” however, “if you try to do revolutionary, the risks are higher.”
That rather new reality – as projected by CoRE 2010 – is a hallmark of the partnerships that service companies now enjoy but work quite hard to maintain with corporate real estate executives and their bosses.
The rise in risk sharing is based on a large degree of trust. It’s powered by information sharing. “What makes it powerful,” in Bertasi’s opinion, “is that the cost of capturing, collecting and managing (real time) data is very low.”
Davis points to the “open book” relationships that CBRE has built with various clients and says that such transparency equates to flexibility. Sharing more information promotes an ability to adjust the levels of account services and personnel with client changes resulting from market contractions or by contrast fast-growth conditions.
Adds JCI’s Bertasi, “We like transparency, there’s more stability in the long term.”
Technology is another area where service providers are assuming more risk. “The client is more open to letting CBRE leverage the technology,” Davis advises. “The client doesn’t need to own it.”
‘Baked-in’ Outcomes
There’s a less obvious area where risk is being shared more by service companies. It’s embedded in the business goals and objectives of their corporate clients. The same metrics that corporations, as well as their corporate real estate and workplace operations, have to live up to every quarter are the goals and objectives of the service providers whose contracts are evaluated against them.
“Our company is at risk,” Davis assesses, “with the outcomes that are ‘baked into’ the client’s corporate objectives.” The fact that CBRE and many other service providers are being judged on this basis shows that the “CoRE 2010 prediction is occurring” of service providers assuming more risk, according to Davis.
There are many ways to meet risk head on, and one is to strengthen performance and economy of scale by broadening service lines. Davis, a licensed architect, points out the advantages of having specialists within CBRE that touch on design, space utilization, flexibility and other skills not traditionally associated with corporate service delivery.
Broadening augments the quality of service, adds to performance and creates efficiencies through more of a “one-stop shopping” model that benefits clients, as Davis outlines it.
Grubb and Ellis’ Stoner has a similar view. “Our people are more than real estate folks; the skill set of primary account managers is more general business knowledge with process, technology and strategy. Knowing real estate is key, but it’s not the only element.”
So real estate is extending its domain. Inside the corporate environment, the so-called enterprise skill set outlined within CoRE 2010 is already extending real estate’s influence well beyond shared services into the C-Suite and directly out to the business units. Service providers are wisely adopting the same skill set. It all ties back to integration, alignment and strategic-level partnering.
“It’s really about the strength of the professionals involved in the relationship,” reminds Cushman & Wakefield’s Morris.
| Need for ‘Unprecedented Rigor’ Defines Model Changing business models and changing client needs are two key reasons why service providers are themselves changing, as Equis Corp.’s CEO David Montross sees it. The fast-developing integrated global supply chain now rede.ning the industry is influenced by the need “to operate in a leaner environment.” As a result, “The service provider industry has changed signi.cantly, to keep pace with and develop innovative end-to-end solutions for our client base.” Corporate clients are no longer treating real estate as a transactional necessity. “Today, the corporate environment increasingly views real estate as a treasury asset, with signi.cant fiscal impact potential,” Montross observes. But there are new elements being added to the mix. “The business models and their differences have become even more distinct because of legislation and internal management processes of our clients. With the added pressures of new governance legislation and rules like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), it is clear that clients need an unprecedented degree of rigor, process orientation and transparency.” The demand side of the industry is gaining more sway compared to a decade ago. “Ten years ago the conventional business model supported both landlords and the users of space, allowing the industry to have inherent conflict that would ultimately leave the client at a disadvantage.” But today, things are different. “There is a growing need among clients to have an integrated and global service platform that goes beyond transactions to offer advisory services at all stages in a client’s real estate cycle.” Thus, management of the full life cycle of real estate assets is another hot button. Recent Equis research shows from the clients’ perspective what they see as the greatest value, Montross relates: “Understanding our client’s business needs means developing strategic real estate solutions that support what the corporation is trying to achieve. Equis focuses on developing innovative solutions for our clients as part of each service offering. All of our consulting and transaction staff take this advisory perspective.” — Richard Kadzis |
Bottom-line Accrual
The advantages of alignment accrue to the bottom line of partnership status for providers and their clients. As JLL’s Phillips sees it, “If you’re working on a true partnership with your clients and you’re focused on that and you’re structured in a way that you can respond, then we ought to be growing hand in glove, and our clients expect us to bring them ideas and best practices and be proactive.”
JCI’s Bertasi classifies the partnership as a true collaboration. “When we are successful for clients,” as he concludes, “it’s when we get away from the day to day, step back collectively, and we invent or innovate.”
“A decade ago, even five years ago, things like KPI’s (key performance indicators), dashboards and other innovative management tools were like a foreign language to most real estate professionals,” reflects Trammell Crow’s Concannon.
CBRE’s Davis contributes the perspective of service providers’ new ability to manage the entire life cycle of an asset.
Now it’s more of an asset management mentality, Morris of Cushman & Wakefield concurs. As a whole, the industry has “grown dramatically in the area of business solutions, not just commodities or real estate, really business solutions that would be implemented through a real estate footprint or processes or best practices. I just think the level of maturity in the business has grown dramatically in the last 10 years – almost exponentially to be honest.”
That’s why the industry is at an exciting point, JCI’s Bertasi insists. “There’s more collaboration between corporate real estate and service providers. We are jointly increasing the value for space users. At the end of the day, that’s what we need to collaborate on.”
Then, are service providers keeping pace with their clients’ needs? According to JLL’s Phillips, “I believe, yes, we are doing that and the testament is, ‘What do our clients say?'”
“Focused on the client,” is how Bertasi summarizes it.
It goes to show, even with the pace of change accelerating relentlessly, don’t be misled. There’s one piece that can never be outsourced. The client is the boss.
The Future of Corporate Real Estate Service Delivery: Increasingly Outsourced
The Consultant Perspective: Experts See Progress, But Not Enough, in the Service Provider Industry
