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Brick and Mortar vs. Technology -- which to choose? |
( Internet and Technology The next 10 years ...
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Years ago, there was a young man who worked in a research laboratory specializing in computer science. He was very inventive. He created a way to show critical path planning using a set of levers and slides. It was like a big child's game made of wood It made things so clear for those involved in that technology. Ah, now I understand. He also was one of the inventors of spreadsheets which dominate financial and business planning. The company he worked for did not exploit them, but used what he invented way before Microsoft created Excel and way before Lotus. Remember Lotus? He left the research environment and set up a small consulting firm. He made software. Being a future thinker, he felt that there was no reason to have an office. It just generated costs. He needed computers not buildings. He could rent a big conference room for one day a week where he would get his crew together for planning the next week's work or meeting with customers. His company existed using email before the Internet became what it is today. They used email very early. Today, more and more companies are thinking about discarding the traditional office. The technology is almost there. It's very easy to do demos over the Internet of many types of products. Conference meetings are easy to do also. If you have not participated in a modern Internet Conference meeting, it is hard to appreciate how effective they can be. As many of you know, someone in India can log on to your PC in your den and debug your system. You may have trouble understanding the dialect, but the work can be done with the right person on the other end. This leads to doing very rapid demos on your machine or interacting on all manner of documents in which two or more people can work at the same time. So why are organizations still paying for huge buildings? Why are they spending millions of dollars on brick and mortar that is really not needed? The standard answer is that they need human interaction face to face. This is often true when you're dealing with customers selling or on site servicing a product. You have to 'press the flesh' But, it is very clear that many organizations don't need to pack their employees into a central location every day. You should be able to perform work from any place in the world. The technology is almost there to eliminate the need for buildings for many business enterprises. They just don't make sense any more. Large international companies have huge costs associated with buildings and offices over and above their plants that produce the products. Let's look at some examples: High Technology Companies (software & services) These companies and their investors should right now get rid of their offices. That's hard to stomach, but any new company should not have an office. It's often a vanity thing for a new startup ... signs and furniture .... Everything is there to do what they want without having offices. They can have regional rented conference rooms to bring people together on a schedule. Sales people should always work from their home. If a sales person needs an administrative assistant, get rid of them. They are not up to it. 04/02/2009 09:47 PM
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Manufacturing Firms They have a need for plants and associated administration, but can get rid of offices for finance, sales and marketing. Working on a spreadsheet is not geographical and most business runs on spreadsheets, the Internet and the phone. Research Laboratories Many of these need locations for physical experimentation and prototype work, but they could cut way down on office space for their finance and management people. Town and City Offices As communities expand, municipal offices grow and always seem to be in some sort of space crunch. Much of this is not necessary. Most everyone is sitting in front of a computer anyway and they can communicate in much fuller and more robust ways with a new way of looking at things. They just don't think they are ready for it. The problem is that there is no precedent for this and it will take years to get enough technology and training into the system to make things fly. If you could create a new town now, what would it look like administratively? Would it be like the old town administrations or would it be built based on new technology? School Boards Taking a look at how school boards have expanded, it would be possible right now to convert them into having a very small core office and conference rooms and disperse the employees over the breadth of the geographic location. Let the administration travel to have face to face meetings with principals or use the technology available to hold group web-meetings. Why is it that principals are so often not at the schools? They are attending meetings. School Boards also continue to grow buildings. It's not necessary because the very things that they manage (schools) are dispersed. They also appear to be backward in the way they work with computers. Doing a dispersal over time might help them. The very children that they serve, are often better with technology than their teachers are, by the time they reach 9th grade. The creating of all powerful Information Technology staffs is not good for school boards or any business. They grow like mad and they hold back technology based upon some fear of uniformity and job security. People are becoming too knowledgeable to believe that they have to wait for wireless, wait for the latest program, wait for an easy to use conferencing ability... when it has been installed in their homes by their teenagers. Information Technology staffs need to get out front and produce technology that better serves their customers' needs. Huge Retail Business Just because you shop at a huge, central mall does not mean that the companies are not dispersed. Big retail runs on computers and inventory control. If you look at a company like Wal-Mart or Tim Horton's, you'll see that they fit a more modern model. Wal-Mart went right past K-Mart because they understood that huge administrative staffs in a central location could not manage a far-flung retail business without technology. The scale of their administrative staff and where they are located fits a more modern model. The Internet fuelled their growth. The K-Mart headquarters in Troy, Michigan is a beautiful building, but they are and, have been, behind due to computer science, not the architecture of their headquarters.
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