Redistributing the Workplace - ' Counting the Cost '

Counting the Cost

CIO Insight: This has hit at, of course, a time when the economy is kind of retrenching. When you talk about distributed work forces, you're talking inevitably either new technology or new facilities or both, and doesn't that cost a lot of money?

Grantham: I'm seeing businesses such as Sun Microsystems, to give you an example, saying wait a second, right now we've got one desk for every 0.8 person. Well, we're going to move to a facility strategy where we've got one desk for every 1.5 people. So what they're basically doing is decreasing their facilities cost by close to 50 percent. That means they're going to have many fewer buildings, they're going to be using the interior space of the buildings they have in a vastly different way, and in maybe some cases, they won't even be providing the physical facility that their employees need to use.

I guess Sun has been the most vocal here in Silicon Valley in doing that, but other companies that I'm working with, such as Intel, Cisco Systems, Agile Software, PeopleSoft, and Cap One, are all starting to think through the same process at the very top level. If anything is new, it is the fact that this issue has gotten into the CEO's office in the past year, where it used to be the concern of a functional department head, the VP of whatever. It's gotten the attention of the chief executives now.

CIO Insight: How is that going to manifest itself in the short term and in the longer term?

Grantham: In the short term, I think during the next year or so we're still going to be in planning mode, because the economy is not that good, and people aren't staffing up work forces. They're still staying level or still going down. And it takes a while to work through the system. I mean, you can't get out of leases overnight. You can't convert your backbone network to wireless overnight. You can't change your hiring practices overnight. It's going to take some time.

The real impact is going to be a couple of years out. Like a snake that just ate a chicken. It takes a while for the chicken to get through the system. But coupled with that, we got whacked with the telecom meltdown at exactly, in my opinion, the wrong time, because this is where we ought to really be thinking about how to use all that capacity out there to stretch the network out to connect places together. But we don't seem to be doing that right.

We've got more capacity than anybody can dream about using all the way out to the last mile. How much extra capacity, I couldn't really give you a number, but it's far more than we could suck up if everybody had videoconferencing and broadband everywhere. But we're missing that last link. The build-out of that last link came to a screeching halt with the meltdown in the telecom sector. There's no financial incentive to complete the job.

CIO Insight: So you're suggesting that this is one way to use this extra capacity?

Grantham: Yes. Collaborative online applications for work groups is one. Online broadband electronic learning, e-learning is another. They're there, there are people that are still banging away in a garage trying to create the killer application, but the pieces haven't quite all come together.