Meanwhile, a small number of well-positioned players in the property management industry have developed similar portfolio-management platforms by partnering with software and controls companies.

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Now that grunge work is conducted by powerful "operations management" software systems developed by businesses such as General Electric Intelligent Platforms in Charlottesville, Va.

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It services hundreds of global firms, including Goldman Sachs, Visa and DHL. Infosys has developed switching software for Cisco, a factory management system for Nestl and an inventory tracking application for Nordstrom.

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Summit Energy has developed a software-based, real-time energy management solution that allows users to save energy.

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The largest, and most fully developed, body of management expertise for dealing with complexity lies elsewhere, in software development with the practices known variously as Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean and Extreme Programming.

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