BayState Realty is one of the largest and most successful real estate agencies in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with over 370 agents, a headquarters in the Back Bay of Boston and 12 regional offices across New England. The offices in Boston accommodate 280 employees on two floors, including both agents and all of the firm’s administrative and operational functions, like accounting and information systems. Each HQ employee has a wired workstation running on a local area network (LAN). The LAN allows office access to common services and to share high-end printers, computer projection systems, and local data-back-up servers. Employees also use a variety of wide-area networks (WANs) to access a rich body of documents stored on BayState’s servers that are hosted at the off sight, BayState Realty Data Center.
As part of day-to-day operations, the firm employs a customer relationship management (CRM) system to maintain information on its high-end corporate and residential clients as well as potential clients. The firm also maintains large, multi-media files of photographs, floor plans, and video tours for all of the properties it represents for its clients. In addition, the firm operates an Internet site to market its services to the public, an Extranet site for the management of its commercial real estate business in collaboration with corporate partners and affiliations across the globe, and an Intranet site as a knowledge repository for selling best practices and as a gateway to many other firm-wide information resources. The culture at BayState is fast-paced but highly collaborative which means that timely information sharing is essential for success.
Sally Smith is the chief information officer (CIO) for BayState. In this role, Sally must ensure that firm employees have access to all of the software required to enable BayState’s core business processes – i.e. working with customers around the buying and selling, or the leasing and renting of either…