Office Evolution... Can you imagine what a typical office plan looks like projected onto an eight-story IMAX screen? Well, it ain't pretty. Just rows and rows of prison-like cubicles. But when Mark Golan, Vice President, Worldwide Real Estate & Work Place Resources at Cisco, displayed his idea of corporate work space in the future, the plan looked very inviting -- team work areas, conference rooms for meetings and a quiet library for research.

Golan kicked off this year's Realcomm Conference, "RE.IGNITING Innovation," in San Francisco last week with a terrific presentation on the changing nature of the workplace and the need for collaboration and flexibility. Why shouldn't we use space in our offices like we use space in our homes? After all, at home we use different rooms for different activities. So why not use different spaces in an office setting, depending upon our tasks? Why be should we be constrained to a single "office"?

All of this, of course, will be enabled by technology. And anybody wandering around Realcomm's exhibition hall visiting the 125 vendors -- divided into two broad categories: business automation and intelligent buildings -- would have recognized that corporate America is beginning to get the picture. Gone are 90% of the real estate dot-coms, replaced by giants like Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP.

How to summarize the resultant tsunami of information? While it's clear that technology can "improve" all components of the "real estate life cycle," it's much harder to determine where to focus your energies. (Remember The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Dispatch, Jan 27, 2004.) How should you prioritize your efforts? Over the next few weeks, I'll write about the ideas that stuck in my brain.

Spread the Word... Many thanks to Brian McGowan, CEO of Peracon, for sponsoring this week's Dispatch. Peracon provides online transaction management services. If you would like to tell Dispatch readers about your services, send e-mail or call 415-485-6700.

--Peter Pike