I don't have any single take on this, Chuck. A key component to answering your question, however, may lie in the fact that the small business spaces I'm referring to are depending less these days on the local LAN than one would assume.
One scenario that is satisfied by this arrangement, conceivably, is the "hoteling" mode of user access, whereby a desk is used by multiple parties [not necessarily from the same organization, or department within an organization] at different times, or as a shared resource.
In such instances these may be a group of individuals, all with their own security profiles and passwords, or small branch operations, using remotely hosted servers which reside in web-colo sites, or where they home to a larger corporate LAN presence, elsewhere.
Temporary corporate office leasing arragements, in other words, which mimic the attributes of a Cyber Cafe. But this is an extreme example, granted. There are more practical ones, some of which I enumerate below.
These scenarios are not uncharacteristic to financial-district real estate dynamics, say, or any other center of a specified form of commerce activity that is identifiable immediately with a neighborhood, where everyone and their uncle wants to say they have an office on "Wall Street," as an example. Every town has their own favored "address."
To these and other ends, there are VPN SPs and specialized hosting services who are making available "virtual enterprise level LANS" which transcend geographic boundaries, that actually demand that the user either dial in, or connect through some dedicated mean$, for basic access purposes to corporate information. I'm finding that the means and number of ways by which these individuals are being virutalized, represents a rapidly growing trend right now.
In fairness, most of the parcels that I made reference to actually cater to individuals and startup software firms under the hyperbole of what the city is calling "Silicon Alley," so, you can temper what I said accordingly, but that doesn't mitigate the fact that this stuff is actually going in and being used. On the contrary.
Many of the partitioned parcels I've made reference to are intended for one to three person standalone operations, or very small decentralized businesses of various pursuasions, like software developers who do collaborative web-dsign development work cross-country, or internationally, or new media outfits tied into the West Coast, and locally stationed individuals of larger remote corporations, whose primary data resources may be their own workstations, or in remote corporate locations. Maybe someone else can offer some other reasons why these configurations may be attractive.
In my situation, my work takes me away from the office most of the time, as is the case right now. And this holds true for most of my senior consulting staff, as well. A 100% purely virtually defined office is something that I've been contemplating doing for a long time, but there are problems with this which are sometimes institutional, sometimes perceptual, and I'm not quite ready to let go of brick and mortar presence at this time.
It matters not if you use the office, these days, but it does matter to some clients if you tell them that you don't have one. Some clients, depending on their value structures, would think more highly of an org if you gave them a Wall Street address, for example, even though you didn't use it, as opposed to operating more efficiently in a virtual dimension, and likewise didn't use an office, only this time, because you didn't have one. And so it goes...
Gotta run now. Later.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
