Under the Leading Workplace strategy, the business case to advance it is “triple bottom line”; it's not just energy savings.
The demographic emerging into the workspace is interested in flexible mobile working. There's not an interest in the corner office anymore as being the sign of success. Recognizing that, the way the Leading Workplace strategy works is primarily through collaborative tools. Working at home or working at a different office or even a different space in the same building still requires interaction.
To maximize and maintain the quality of that experience, part of the rollout.... There's the building part that I've spoken about, but as you mentioned, the IT side is equally important, and there is as much focus on that part as there is on what the space looks like if it is to accommodate people. We use Live Meeting regularly and routinely. We have opportunities, such as what we're doing here, to video conference each other in whenever we need to. We have smartphones that have a high capacity to access our files, which are centrally located on a centralized system. Those IT tools are critical.
It's been said that the most energy efficient space is the space that's not needed. That's essentially where we're going: doing demand-side management efforts, starting from asking whether we actually need the space, and if we need the space, how we can design it or maximize its efficiency to reduce the energy load requirement, and then once we know what the load requirement is, what system we should be putting in to provide that energy.
It starts from questioning whether the space is needed and how we should use it to maximize its utilization.