Many organizations considering a new office design or office move make a number of basic errors. They will often choose the building first, before considering the interior design to match the organization needs. Then, having made one error, they compound it by giving the job running the move to the IT Department.
Now, IT Departments have a lot of qualities: they are using technology to deliver business benefits, to cut costs, even introduce process innovation to deliver competitive advantage. And they are fairly well-employed just achieving those goals.
What the IT Department does well is what it does on a day-to-day basis: it knows about workstations; it knows about servers; its fully involved with patching; and anti virus procedures; and its delivering new systems. And then, just when its trying to deliver on those goals, you ask it to organize the office move
or the new office design.
Why your IT Department should stick to its core business
Your IT department is not looking ahead thinking about your office move and office design because it is already well-employed doing what it already does. Some non-IT people within the organization might believe that your IT department knows everything about IT but they don't realize how broad a subject office relocation really is.
Actually, if you examine how well an IT department has organized office moves in the past, you will find that most IT people are embarrassed about how messy and disorganized their server rooms can be from an air conditioning and power management perspective. You will rarely find IT organized air conditioning that is well organized, neat and tidy. That is not a criticism of the IT department efforts: IT is simply starting out with limited knowledge about office design. There really is too much important stuff about air conditioning, building design and power management that IT really only has a sketchy understanding of.
IT won't have talked about a unified, integrated approach to office design you cannot expect it to and if you asked your IT department to design a conduit for all the data switches, network switches and servers, then that is exactly what it will do. It will put the server into the rack and put the racks in the computer room. But if you were to ask your IT director the optimum configuration to use, and how it is being or cooled, then you will get an incomplete answer, because that is an area that most departments are not sufficiently aware of.
That is not to say that some people in IT wont get enjoy the responsibility of organizing the office move. Some will like the opportunity of working on the new office design, and they may even make a passable job of it. Generally, it goes one of two ways, both of which are almost diametrically opposed to each other.
About the Author:
Hugh Roberts has been a specialist in
office design and build for 20 years and a regular contributor on this subject.
For more articles and surveys on this subject visit
www.interiorsgroup.co.uk
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280
Date Published :
Sep 17 2007