Vinit Kohli, Vice President of MIS at Sibcy Cline

What are the top 2 challenges facing IT organizations this year? What are the top 2 opportunities? 

“Mobile is a great opportunity and also a very real challenge. Sixty-five percent of our traffic is mobile now. Obviously everyone is mobile-sensitive and going in that direction, but the consumer habits with mobile tech are constantly changing, so our use of it must be thought through completely. What we find is that individuals are performing searches on their own and want to be able to find the latest and greatest information right now. So in our saved search environment, we offer clients a home search feature through an extranet login, where they are able to see real-time information on the listings they have added to their saved-searches. Sellers can also look in and see all the activity tied to their listing – how many visits, how many showings and so on – it’s all accessible to both parties through this type of reporting mechanism. Data analytics is a big piece in all this. Our website provides a lot of rich data and community content for all the townships, school districts and the background information tied to the demographics in these areas. Just six months ago, we also began showing Sold Listings, so that people don’t have to go to Hamilton County’s website to find that data. Being a go-to site for today’s user means we provide as many solutions as possible in one place. We must try to figure out what new things these users are interested in seeing and to provide that in some fashion.”

Security is certainly a big challenge. It is very common to hear about the security threats tied with mobility. Security for us is largely about how we prepare our user base to be well-educated about operating securely. We recently had a person from the FBI come in and talk to us about security threats in the real estate business and in cybersecurity specifically. It has become a very big issue for companies of all sizes, all over the world, and we have to understand why a local company like us should still have concerns about regional and international issues. It is true, unfortunately, that we live in a world where we have to be concerned about cybersecurity. There’s a lot of innovation going on in that battle too, and on both sides! Security is definitely a part of the conversation and it’s going on at all levels. It’s about finding the right technology tool set to handle it and providing education to the users so that they know how to react.”