In building any Professional Commercial Realty business, utilizing your contacts and social networking relationships allows deals to be put together. Over time, one establishes favored services from title companies, lenders, legal firms, and the list goes on. More frequently venders are providing web services or enabled web applications. Using the Piggy-Bank extension in the Firefox browser will allow you to aggregate representative web sites, almost as though you were partnering with 3rd parties to expedite marketing activities to close new business.

Piggy-Bank has the following features:

• Collect information from the Web.
• Save information for future use.
• Tag information with keywords.
• Search and Browse collected information.
• Retrieved saved information.
• Share information you have collected.
• Install screen scraper.

Tagging is a feature that lets you record additional information on the items you save so that you can retrieve them more effectively in the future. Piggy-Bank shows each item with a tag textbox where you can type several keywords (tags) separated by commas.

Piggy-Bank also lets you tag a web page with several keywords as a means to bookmark that page. To tag a web page, hit the backslash key \ or invoke the menu command Tools » Piggy Bank » Tag This Page. Piggy Bank will show a toolbar at the bottom of the window where you can type in keywords. Unlike the difficulty you have with to many bookmarks, bookmarking a page via this method will be something you can find more quickly upon reference back to it.

So as we collect web sites in the same way as we build Property Banks, we can use tags or invent our own to help us describe the web site, web pages, web services or applications that has been saved. By consolidating our business relationships with service providers, we have saved ourself from building a custom desktop or portal making it easier to obtain tools from marketing partners and keeping those relationships close.

As another application example where commercial real estate assets can be an integral part of a business application using Property Banks, this article will illustrate a potent real life example.

Securitydirector, LLC developed the 1st portal dedicated to Corporate Enterprise Security Management (ESP). ESP worked so well for a foundation for large firms that it was made available and affordable to small and medium size companies giving them comparable functionality that in the past only the big corporate security departments could afford. One of the specialties that was conceived by Company CEO Filippo Marino was a very special piece of software used by security department’s crisis management and control centers called the Early Warning Operators Terminal (EWOT). The original version was prototyped for General Motors to scan and rank by a proprietary formula assigned criticality to open source news as well as company internal reports generated by employees. The results of EWOT are daily Intel briefings delivered to key executive in each of their respective multinational locations. Warnings are an effort to prevent or limit potential adverse financial impacts on the firm allowing time for executing contingency plans.

One of the things we encounter every so often when working with a customer is their lack of internal knowledge about their assets, operations and personnel. The EWOT application is used by operators and security analysts to track events over time with the results of their work being a daily intelligence briefing, an up to date briefing web page and if an items criticality is high enough an alert that goes out immediately to the point of contact or facilities manager whose property assets are affected.

Thus to empower the operators a Property Bank is an ideal means of describing the main global assets of a multinational firm. The reason, not only for its geographic sake, is it can include information about the key personnel attached to the facility. It will also define operational characteristics all of which are important to the Early Warning Operators and analysts in capturing news to prioritize or rank its importance. If for example there is a safety incident at a nuclear power plant but your operators do not realize he has a facility bordering a neighboring country next to it, early warning efforts will not do you much good if the item is missed. A geographic data point can be critical to the ranking process.

With a Property Bank operators care capable of making cross references to them do their job quickly and accurately. And in most circumstances a facilities manager might be the resource for the data that goes into the bank. Remember from our previous articles, a bank can contain many properties which can be manipulated much easier than a database.

Then comes the day when a single urgent warning goes out to an executive. Often times the recipient calls back to the security department for more information. In all likelihood, it may be a question about the appropriate policy, procedure or best practice guidelines to follow. In this case the operator could pass along with the alert the specific asset in the Property Bank specific to the location of the plant site. Contained in the instance data for the asset involved are resource links back to the digitized knowledge or documentation on the company’s contingency plans applicable to the target location that applies to the warning. Besides simply security policies the resources may include the contingency plans, business process management guidelines or standard operating procedures. In any event, in that an alert is a high criticality, the executive in charge of operations can immediately act to get his fingers on the answers he needs in support of his decision process and actions. This takes the burden off of the security department and is only called upon when a specific skill set is needed for the alerted situation. Property Banks not only server the operators but the customers who receive the alerts.