IDEAS in action at LaSalle: Data and technology

In a world overflowing with technology-driven business solutions, companies need to be more strategic than ever to choose the technology that can drive the most value for their clients, industry, and people.

What’s LaSalle’s big IDEA?

At LaSalle, our technology strategy is driven by IDEAS – Invest, Data, Efficiency, AI and Sales.

The five components of our IDEAS framework are designed to guide our internal teams to ensure they are deriving maximum benefit from new technologies:

The framework ensures LaSalle’s teams stay ahead; always ready to adopt innovative new capabilities that can transform the way we work. 

Our vision of data and technology

It’s our ambition at LaSalle to move toward capturing global data. But it’s not just about data collection. It’s also about ensuring data is reliable and leveraging technology to make all relevant data easy to access for employees and investors.

While we’re aiming to create a simple, clean experience for end users, the process to get there is detailed and complex.

Our Global Data Strategy Team is responsible for delivering on a comprehensive plan to reimagine our existing data structure in a more modern, more efficient way. And their work is already underway.

One single source of truth

Our Global Data Strategy Team is developing a systematic approach to organizing and categorizing all data across LaSalle. Their focus is first on maintaining data integrity – not only categorizing all the data, but also ensuring the data within each category is reliable.

One of their goals is to move away from prioritizing data quantity over quality, which can raise questions about reliability and lead to hesitation to fully utilize collected information.

Andrew Muscat, Global Head of Investor Accounting and Finance and leader of the Global Data Strategy Team, explains more:

“Our initiative aims to guide all parts of the business in refining their data strategies. We are enforcing a ‘one data point – one source’ rule to eliminate duplication of data sources, which leads to discrepancies in reported data. The goal is to instill confidence in our teams, encouraging them to leverage our data resources to their full potential.”

Once this foundational work is completed and a single source of truth for each data point is in place, the work begins on user experience. Leveraging technology is a priority in this phase. By having cutting-edge GPT technology in place, it empowers employees and investors to use the system as needed.

“There is a lot of data across different categories, so it’s important to leverage technology to make our data as accessible as possible, to support the ability for users to find what they need. We want their experience to be one of getting reliable data easily, at any time they need, through a free-form chat GPT style question box,” Muscat explains.

Data governance in a modern world

Having a technology-forward interface that makes data access easy and quick also brings forward other important considerations, like data governance.

While LaSalle already has established strong data governance practices, exercises like this provide good reason to review practices and refresh any requirements that can leverage more recent or more modern information.

“We are in the process of augmenting our data governance framework. Our focus is first on data quality, and governance comes in the form of ensuring we document processes, business checks, controls, and oversight in a way that is tailored to each data category,” said Muscat.

Governance approaches will also leverage automated data quality checks wherever possible.

Other focus areas for governance include ensuring proper data architecture, security and privacy checks are in place and up to date.

By working on our data strategy, LaSalle is poised to unlock the full potential of technology and data, creating a future that we hope will revolutionize how we work.

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