New Trends
Centuries-old traditions of accommodating information workers are being challenged by a number of new factors. One is the democratisation of organisations, even if sometimes more apparent than real. The challenging of hierarchy is expressed both in "delayering" and in the physical location of managers, who are more likely to have smaller officers or have to share space.
A renewed emphasis on the bottom line also informs decisions to restructure and relocate office functions: the costs involved in high rents for central office property and avoidable travel through congested traffic networks are provoking some radical rethinking.
There is thus a general trend towards new-built offices, better connected to the roads network (usually edge-of-town), with built-in flexibility for both internal office design and wiring. But there is also a trend towards a virtual or teleworking office environment.
New information and communication technology (ICT) challenges the necessity of concentrating large groups of information workers together. With its need for modern wiring it also imposes new demands on buildings. The costs of refurbishing old offices often acts as a spur to radical thinking about the location of the organisation.
Use of the new ICT does not spell the end of offices. Instead, it challenges spatial preconceptions about offices. The office, in terms of its personnel, systems and information resources, can disperse and regroup at will. Maybe even that is more traditional than we think: the office of a medieval bank or monarch could travel en masse, or in part, maintaining cohesion between fixed and temporary bases via an infrastructure of clerks and couriers.
So do these trends spell the end of offices? Most probably not. The physical boundaries of offices may change, and the extent to which people need to be physically concentrated in the same place at the same time. But structures/infrastructures for collective work and collaboration, for both physical and virtual meeting, are still required.
Even homeworking networked professionals need a "home office" to work in. Perhaps it is true to say that wherever two people are gathered together to work with information, there is an office. The question may be more about the nature, location, design and mobility or fluidity of offices, than whether they will continue to exist. History may be on their side.