Austin Board of Realtors

A member organization lives on systems it does not own: listing services, member portals, vendors' platforms. When those fail, members blame the association, and the board hears about it before the staff can explain it.

In March 2013 the Austin Board of Realtors engaged Frank to investigate whether technology was letting the organization and its members down. He confirmed that it was, across core IT, policy and advanced solutions.

The board asked him to stay as interim chief technology officer and fix what he had found. He held the role until March 2014 and ran dozens of projects in that year.

The ones below are the problems most organizations will recognize as their own. The rest of the list follows.

• We depend on vendors and cannot prove when they fail. He built a mini network operations center to monitor the third-party systems members relied on and to track each vendor's SLA compliance.
• We pay too much for too little bandwidth. He replaced a single T1 provider with Ethernet over fiber from two carriers. Network capacity quadrupled, and it cost less than the T1 had.
• The board sees numbers late, if at all. KPI reporting was automated, so the figures arrived on schedule without someone assembling them by hand.
• We do not control our own code. A source code control policy and secure off-site custody of the code, so the organization owned what it had paid for regardless of which developer or vendor was in the chair.
• Nobody knows how many problems there are. A trouble ticketing system that documented and resolved hundreds of issues a month.
• Our data is not answering questions. GIS maps of members and of water districts, putting the membership and the market on a map.

A replacement network, storage, backup and phone system. Wi-Fi built for 50 staff and hundreds of members connected at once. Document management. The evaluation of a new member management system through to a signed contract. Work with board committees on the new headquarters. And new sites for ABOR.com and AustinHomeSearch.com, started.