When we approached looking at federal office space.... There are two basic elements you need to know if you're planning on reducing it: how much office space you have and how it is being used. While how much you have is known, how it is being used is the missing element. If you want to be able to consolidate buildings and free up buildings or, as a witness said earlier, if you want to target buildings, you need to know how they're being used so that you know how many public servants you have to move. That's what's missing—the standardized collection of information that would give that piece of information to PSPC.
We looked at how federal tenants know who's in the building, how often it is being used and how much space is underutilized or left vacant. There are so many ways this is being tracked—badge swipes, applications or just physical counting—and that's not giving you a reliable picture. It's difficult to consolidate when you're not comparing the same elements. We felt that this basic piece of information was key to help solve how to target going forward.