Cecilia Li | Chief Innovation Officer | Urban Edge | Whats your frustration with innovation

🎥 Oct 03, 2022 📺 James Dearsley ⏱ 2m 👁 1 views

About Cecilia Li

Cecilia Li, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Urban Edge Properties, has described innovation as the implementation of new ideas and a new way of thinking, stating that it is part of the company's culture. She has characterized Urban Edge as a "technology-forward" company that is not afraid to implement new tools, provided they solve problems and help drive net operating income. Li has said that on average over the last three years the company has undertaken about 90 technology initiatives annually. She has identified cost, time, and buy-in as the biggest challenges in innovation, noting that in the current economy it is difficult to justify spending on solutions with uncertain returns and that people are busy with daily operations, making time for side projects a challenge. Li has emphasized the importance of communication, stating it is the key to success, and has described her leadership philosophy as requiring a strong work ethic, building a "village" of collaborators, and taking care of that village. Li has discussed her personal journey, noting she began her career as a help desk intern at a real estate brokerage company and later led a business transformation that included an e-commerce launch that generated in one hour what had previously taken an entire day. She has said that many leadership roles like hers are generated for the person and did not exist beforehand. Li has also discussed the importance of including the business in decision-making and design, citing a mistake where a business intelligence dashboard was built without sufficient input and was rejected by the leasing team and CFO. She has stated that people will embrace change if their problems are truly solved and that the goal is to change behavior, not just technology. Li has noted that Urban Edge has an ESG committee chaired by the head of Asset Management and that the company outsources its development, infrastructure, and cybersecurity teams.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Cecilia Li's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (3 segments)

Interviewer0:04

Because from the sounds of everything that you've talked about already, you're obviously on quite a journey with Urban Edge. Just to recap, you're talking about 70 plus buildings, over 17 million square feet operated within. I'm interested in the frustrations you've had with any innovation processes you follow. What have you had to deal with? What is your frustration about the process maybe?

Cecilia Li0:39

Hang on, so tough time and buy-in. Yeah, time and buy-in, right? Cost, time, and buy-in. Go on, expand on that. Yeah, so cost. I thought they were the kind of the economy. Economy and what we're living in, it's hard to justify this span of, you know, X amount of dollars in order to build a solution that who knows if you're going to have a true return on investment, right? So these are the times where we really have to ask ourselves, is the juice worth the squeeze? Right. And then the time, right? People are busy. I said that before. They need time to work on their nine-to-five job or their daily operations, and on top of that, work on a side project. I mean, most people engage in a technology project out of a reaction to an unfavorable situation, right? Take COVID-19 as an example, or the flood that we had, the blackout that we had. A lot of these technologies, like disaster recovery, a lot of it had been for some companies out of an unfavorable situation, a reaction to an unfavorable situation, right? And then the last one is buy-in, right? The challenge is to find the best way to convince people that a solution can help solve the problem they're facing. And if you manage to do that, then you need to set expectations because they want the problem solved now, right this minute, and for the solution to be seamless. I wouldn't call it the biggest restriction, but definitely challenges that are top of mind.

Interviewer2:35

Yeah, and from the sounds of what you're talking about there, that third reference point of buy-in, it sounds as if the cost and the time...