Get connected

Take 18 million m² of property, worth £35 billion. Extract the owners – British Land, Canary Wharf, Prudential, Legal & General and Norwich Union – and get them to form a consortium. Spice with US investment bank Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (MSDW) and add someone with experience of both technology and property – say, Lorraine Baldry, a former head of the British Property Federation and information technology specialist to boot.

What you get is a proposal to wire up every building in the partners’ collective portfolio with the latest high capacity broadband technology with a view to providing a host of add-on services.

Or try this. Take the good bankers at Goldman Sachs, bring in investment firm Provident Equity and season with nine property companies owning around 8.5 million m2 of property. Set off with the same objective.

Then put the two consortia alongside each other and ponder an astounding statistic. They propose to wire up buildings equivalent in size to the entire office stock of central London, plus a bit. And they are not hanging around. The as yet unnamed MSDW consortium has already issued requests for proposals to IT providers. According to Baldry, senior adviser at MSDW, it expects responses within weeks. ‘If you don’t move quickly you miss out,’ she says.

The Goldman Sachs consortium, Centric, is a little further advanced. A memorandum of understanding has been signed and ecu110 million (£71.5 million) of equity has been committed. But the aim is the same. Howard Bibby, managing director of consortium member Arlington Business Services, says the object is to have the equipment installed within six to nine months.

But all of the big numbers are academic unless you realise what the project will lead to. None of the banks or property investors is doing this as an act of philanthropy. The way in which a vast amount of property can be managed, and the services that are available in it, is set to change forever. The implications for facilities professionals are profound.

Bibby explains: ‘The internet, combined with the driving down of communication costs, means it’s possible to have permanently open links.’ There is no longer a need for dial-up connections or expensive leased lines.

This has implications for security and mechanical and engineering maintenance. For example, says Bibby: ‘If you have lines open all the time, you can have remote monitoring and substitute permanent on-site staff with mobile teams, for example via a WAP phone.’

The image of the bored security officer nodding off just as the burglars break in is consigned to history. And things like pictures can be stored digitally, rather than on tape, and rapidly searched by date and time, enhancing productivity.

The story is similar with mechanical and electrical engineering. Building management systems free up on-site staff. For instance, attach a sensor to a pump and as soon as it vibrates beyond design-specification, it triggers an alarm.

Add to this, says Bibby, that all of the investors’ customers (in modern vogue he does not call then tenants) can track job requests through a link to the service desk. Bibby observes, without a trace of irony, that: ‘It puts an interesting pressure on us, but it’s a way to demonstrate to customers that we can do things.’

The way in which a vast amount of property can be managed, and the services that are available in it, is set to change forever. The implications for facilities professionals are profound

He hints at a fourth possibility that gets to the nitty gritty of why broadband technology is being taken so seriously. Watch out for Arlington web portals offering services to business customers and also their staff. And it may yet go further.

Back at MSDW, Baldry says: ‘The technology allows a lot of additional services,’ citing cheap-to-hire video conferencing or internet-based voice communication. ‘If you can bulk-buy you can offer things that [tenants] may not have thought of doing,’ or assumed they could not afford.

One of the most exciting services is ASP, or application service provider. Until the late 1970s even very large firms could not justify the cost of buying a huge mainframe computer, so rented space on them instead (cult cop show The Sweeney built an entire episode on this fact). Then the microprocessor came along, closely followed by the PC, moving computer power into the office.

But increasing business complexity and the need for more sophisticated systems is bringing back a variant on the old ‘we can’t afford to computerise’ refrain. So why not lease, say, the most sophisticated payroll package managed by a company you trust and access it over the net?

And there is still more.

Paull Robathan of Enigma is a technology consultant to IoD Business Centres, the consortium set up to build a network of business centres for the Institute of Directors. He says: ‘Large multi-national companies will be assuming that their executives are always connected.’ New mobile technology means that full-time, ISDN standard connections to mobiles are possible. WAP is merely the first hint at this and will soon be superseded, he believes, creating an era of hyper-mobility.

The IoD concept requires large buildings, due to the economics of broadband, and is aimed at small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), or large business entering a new area. The consortium includes MEPC, Eurica and Stonemartin.

And security is the biggest growth area. ‘Security staff are becoming more akin to PRs,’ says Eurica chief executive Julian Squire. ‘With all this mobility, people don’t want to feel they are being watched but want to feel they are being protected.’ Robathan adds: ‘The important thing is protecting intellectual property.’ In short, it doesn’t matter if your palm organiser is stolen, as household insurance protects it, but you do need to know the data held on it is secure and retrievable.

Eurica’s head of facilities management, Fred Guscott, says: ‘In a couple of years’ time everything we’ve wanted to do will be possible because there will be no technological barriers. It’s a fundamental change in our industry.’ And he adds: ‘Academics are aware of this but professionals are in shock. One of the biggest issues is that there are not the vehicles to deliver.’ Enter IoD, MSDW and Centric.

‘The workplace will be run like a hotel,’ says Squire, ‘Our job is to be an intelligent portal.’ MEPC’s Mike Adams adds ‘And they want us to make it easy.’