Building on the desktop

In the august British Library, you can turn the pages of a digital version of the Leonardo Notebook by hand. But of the 3,000 to 5,000 readers who visit the library each day, 16 percent are there for the connectivity. It’s the most popular Wi-Fi hotspot among the 1,000 in London.

Today, as I visit, the library is holding a conference on the future of work, hosted by Unwired Ventures. Enthusiasm for Wi-Fi runs high. Next year, indeed, the library is to hold an exhibition of Wi-Fi-enabled furniture, whatever that is.

The talk is of eliminating paper. Desktop PCs will give way to Motorola’s forthcoming MPX mobile phone, a clamshell device with a hinge that allows landscape viewing of data at 2Mbit/s. Another piece of miniaturisation is a Siemens pen that’s a mobile phone – you dial by voice or in the case of a new number, simply write it down.

Within two years, speakers predict, voice over IP (VoIP) will remove the need for phones on the desk. We will gather round laptops for conference calls. Instead of screens, there will be projections onto walls. There will also be more two-screen working, in the manner of IBM’s prototype office of the future, BlueSpace.

Outside the office, multifunction Plantronics headsets will be worn in piazzas with “soft” IT interfaces for tomorrow’s older workforce. Perhaps Bristol shows the way here: in the city centre, digital network provider Cityspace has worked with the local authority and Canada’s BelAir Networks and Nortel Networks to bring on-street Wi-Fi to an area three kilometres square. Already 3,000 registered users spend an average of 40 minutes a session on the system, and 70 percent access it more than once a week.

So far, so wirelessly intrepid. Yet the striking thing about the conference is that it appears facilities managers will determine the future of the workplace more than IT managers. At the British Library, it is the head of estates and facilities, John de Lucy, who has rung the Wi-Fi changes. In America, it isn’t IT managers who will soon be required by law to provide wireless access into all new high-rise buildings, but landlords.

Peter Cochrane, once chief technologist with BT, takes the argument further by suggesting that IT departments will go the way of typing pools. He runs a three terabyte server in his own home, and insists not only that his last terabyte cost only £500, but also that having his own IT department “would only screw things up”.

Perhaps Cochrane goes too far. But there can be no doubt that today’s IT departments ignore the power of the facilities manager at their peril. As Unwired’s Philip Ross notes, there may come a time when every office light, window and door lock will have a short-range radio chip with its own IP address in it. Data rates will be slow; use, only occasional. But the hope is that these chips, currently the subject of R&D by firms grouped into the ZigBee Alliance, will help buildings work harder for their masters.

We live in a property-orientated economy. Will IT managers be ready for such changes? The signs are that they had better be.