A Chat with John Vivadelli, President of AgilQuest

Q: John, you’ve argued that enterprises are investing billions of dollars making their workers mobile but fail to reap the full savings from that investment. Can you elaborate?

A: You have to realize that People/Process, Technology, and Facility are interconnected. Each of these impacts the other two. So, anytime we speak of higher bandwidth, telework or mobility, we need to think about how these impact people`s work processes and the facilities in which they conduct these processes. Technology enables mobility, and mobility strongly implies - in fact, demands - that people, work from multiple locations during their business day. Yet, many managers still assume that one person requires one office to get things done. People get assigned an office, regardless of how they actually use it. We spend millions on laptops, PDAs, cell phones, and high-speed and wireless networks to increase mobility -- and then we assign a person to one desk! This is ridiculously expensive.

Q: A lot of people work in cubicles. How expensive can it be to maintain a desk?

A: According to numerous studies, in the U.S., the average cost for maintaining a workspace is around $10,000 per year. And most of them are empty! Just go to an office, any office, and look around. Observe how much office space is vacant. On average, because workers are mobile, 50 percent to 70 percent of all commercial office space in the U.S. and Europe between the hours of 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. is not being used. That’s waste! And it’s dangerous.

Q: Dangerous? How so?

A: Think about it. You assign a person to a desk, put all of his files in the desk, and set up a computer there. Meanwhile, you neglect to equip a person with the technology and training to work in alternate locations on sudden notice. What happens if there’s a fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane or, God forbid, another terrorist attack? That person has no ability to function. And the organization as a whole has no ability to recover from a disaster. The only way for any organization to ensure true security and continuity of operations is through de-concentration of the workforce and through mobility. De-concentration means spreading the workforce over enough geography to ensure that a disaster in one facility does not impair the entire organization. De-concentration removes real estate as a potential single point of failure. Mobility means equipping employees so they’re not tied to one place to "go to work". The activity called work can be accomplished from many different locations without warning and independent of the duration of the disaster.

Q: Employees are concentrated in central workforces for a reason, aren’t they? Surely there are efficiencies associated with consolidating them in a central location.

A: That used to be true, but efficiencies are diminishing as an increasing percentage of workers become mobile. The parallels between the Network of Space and the Internet and IP networks are unmistakable. The Internet survives because packets of information automatically reroute around server outages to come together at their final destination. At AgilQuest, we believe that real estate must be managed and employed the same way. Organizations need to create a networked infrastructure of workspaces, services and equipment within a building, across a campus or around the world, giving people the ability to choose the office assets they need whenever, wherever, they need to work. If a facility becomes unavailable, workers find available workspaces in other buildings, book them, and get their phone communications routed automatically to that new work location immediately.

Q: The beauty of the Network of Space is that society benefits, too.

A: Absolutely! With real estate operated as a network, people will gravitate to facilities near where they live, reducing vehicle use, pollution, and time wasted commuting. The real estate cost savings associated with managing the use of space is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually for large organizations. Congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia estimates that for the federal government, the savings would be over $1 billion in the D.C. area alone. Guess what this does? The real estate cost savings more than pay for the increased cost of technology/bandwidth needed to make people truly mobile.