Shaun Smith, Senior VP and CIO at Phillips Edison

How do you determine whether or not an idea is worth pursuing?

“During business unit meetings, we listen to understand what the issues and complexities may be with a specific system. We measure that information across all the business units and through that measurement, we find out what the priority is and what will be most beneficial to the organization because more associates will adopt it. We take everyone’s ideas, float them to the business units to gather more input and to ultimately improve what we do. The overarching concept, rather than a waterfall method, is a social one. Our team is built to sit down with associates, listen to the problems they are having, determine how many other associates are having the same problem, and then we tackle the little issues that may have a lot of traction and may be inhibiting the user.

Our thing is all about relationships - the social environment actually helps us construct our technology platforms. Phillips Edison is a real estate company, so we manage a leasing application and with multiple offices throughout the United States, we Skype to bring people into conversation. We listen to what they have to say and then we float those challenges to the asset management group, or to the legal department – we’re constantly going around the organization in this social fashion.”