From survey clipboard to system of record

In July 2002 I joined Karelvane Property Research in Mumbai as a research analyst, two months after completing a postgraduate diploma at the Kaustubha Institute of Applied Statistics. My first degree, from Shrivali College of Science, had also been in statistics. The firm published a quarterly survey of office supply, vacancy and asking rents across the Mumbai region and Pune. My job was to visit buildings in my assigned micro-markets, record which floors were let and reconcile what letting agents told us with what lift lobbies and security registers suggested.

The survey gave me my first professional discipline. A floor described as available might already be under negotiation; a floor recorded as let might stand empty because its occupier had not begun fitting it out. My manager, Meghna Raverkar, insisted that we print our definitions beside every rate. Clients quoted the vacancy figure in their own presentations and nearly always left the definition behind. I learnt early that the person who uses a number is seldom the person who understood its limits.

In August 2006 I moved to Pune to join Nirmeghan Facility Services as an energy data analyst. The company ran building services for office campuses and recovered grid electricity, generator diesel and water costs from occupiers. Readings were taken by hand, typed into spreadsheets and turned into recovery statements. About a third of occupier disputes, I found, arose because a meter did not measure what the statement said it measured: a chiller shared by three floors, a corridor fed from a tenant's board, a generator serving two buildings. I rebuilt the meter register for 38 buildings and wrote down what each meter actually served.

Warehousing came next. From October 2010 I was MIS and planning manager at Paravadi Warehousing Services, a founder-owned operator running seven contract warehouses around Chakan and Talegaon for automotive and consumer-goods customers. Truck gate-in times, dock allocations and inventory counts moved between our warehouse system and our customers' systems. A customer's figure and ours could both be correct and still disagree, because each started the clock at a different gate. Writing down where each clock started settled more arguments than any new report.

I joined Sahyavati Parks in June 2014 as senior manager for lease analytics. The company then had three office parks and was planning its first warehousing park at Chakan. Leases existed as scanned documents, while rent was billed from a separate system that finance had set up years earlier. I led the abstraction of 280 leases into structured records and found that chargeable area, escalation dates and fit-out rent-free periods were not always recorded the same way in both places. Reconciling the two has, in one form or another, been my work at the company ever since.

As head of portfolio data from April 2018, I reported to the chief financial officer and built the lease data warehouse that finance, leasing and asset management now share. The 2020 lockdowns tested it. Occupiers asked for deferrals and waivers in many different forms, and we had to record which concessions changed the lease and which merely moved the timing of cash. Keeping those categories apart meant that the next valuation, and later the pension investor's due diligence in 2021, could see exactly what the company had given up.

The managing director created the chief data officer role in April 2022 and asked me to take it. My remit covers lease and valuation data, energy and water metering, the data held by our access and visitor systems, and our privacy programme. I present to the audit committee before each half-yearly valuation and report every quarter to the board's risk and sustainability committee. I am not a director. The most useful thing I bring to those meetings, I have found, is a plain statement of what a figure was collected for and what it should not be used to decide.

Colleagues would say that I am slow to accept a single number without its definition, and quick to share bad news once I have checked it. I try to make the people who disagreed with me part of the remedy. The facilities team that resisted our metering programme now selects the meters and owns their calibration, and the leasing team that wanted badge-level gate data helped write the visitor notice. I would like my next responsibility to include a board where that discipline is useful beyond our own parks.

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