When offices go PC

As offices have got more complex, salaried posts in facilities management (FM) have multiplied. Yet many firms have also been persuaded that their own staff are not the best people to handle tasks as varied as leaky plumbing and the provision of furniture. As a result, outsourced FM services have grown rapidly. More than half of the £100bn to £200bn FM work in the UK is outsourced to giants such as Amec, Capita, Compass and Jarvis.

FM has grown as corporate ambitions have narrowed and as the outsourcing of everything has become trendy. And it has grown up because of the increasing sense of risk that now surrounds the office.

In 1937, the Swedish economist Ronald Coase argued that firms organise some things themselves to avoid the transaction costs of outsiders doing those things for it. Then, in 1960, US marketing guru Theodore Levitt punctured Coase’s case. In his article Marketing myopia, Levitt insisted that firms should consider much more carefully what business they were in.

In 1990, two new management gurus – CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel – went further. They said that the business of a firm was less to do with what it did, and more to do with what it was expert at.

Soon everyone wanted to stick to what P&H called “core competencies”.

Yet experiences of outsourcing non-core services have been just as mixed with FM as with IT. Certainly there is no guarantee that those who independently supply such services will do so more cheaply or to a higher standard than who have to organise them themselves.

The only guarantee is that pushing responsibility outside the firm will not solve the everyday problems that offices present. Also guaranteed is that the performance of FM suppliers will be measured to death, so ambivalent are feelings about the costs of such arrangements.

So far, so familiar. But IT managers may have overlooked how their colleagues in FM are now joining with regulators to police the ethics of the office.

Soon we will all be forced to worry more about printers using too much energy. The European Commission plans a Framework Directive on what it calls the eco-design requirements for energy-using products in the workplace.

And are you sure that your IT suppliers will, after August 2005, take back their hardware for recycling at the end of its life? Directive 2002/96/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of the EU, which covers waste in electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), insists that they must – for free.

And what about hazardous substances found in IT equipment, such as lead, mercury and cadmium, or the more obscure chromium VI, PBB and PBDE? From 1 July 2006 they will be banned at the behest of Directive 2002/95/EC.

FM has become the workplace-based branch of risk management. Its main job now is to usher in a Second Coming for an old concept: the office of the future. With FM, this office has already arrived, and it is green from carpet to ceiling.