Many organisations considering a new office design or office move make a number of basic errors. They’ll often choose the building first, before considering the interior design to match the organisation’s needs. Then, having made one error, they compound it by giving the job running the move to the IT Department.
Now, IT Departments have a lot of qualities: they’re using technology to deliver business benefits, to cut costs, even introduce process innovation to deliver competitive advantage. And they’re fairly well-employed just achieving those goals.
What the IT Department does well is what it does on a day-to-day basis: it knows about workstations; it knows about servers; it’s fully involved with patching; and anti virus procedures; and it’s delivering new systems. And then, just when it’s trying to deliver on those goals, you ask it to organize the office move or the new office design.
Why your IT Department should stick to its core business
Your IT department is not looking ahead thinking about your office move and office design because it is already well-employed doing what it already does. Some non-IT people within the organizations might believe that your IT department ‘knows everything about IT’ but they don’t realise how broad a subject office relocation really is.
Actually, if you examine how well an IT department has organised office moves in the past, you’d’ll find that most IT people are embarrassed about how messy and disorganised their server rooms can be from an air conditioning and power management perspective. You will rarely find IT-organised air conditioning that is well organised, neat and tidy. That’s not a criticism of IT’s efforts: IT is simply starting out with limited knowledge about office design. There’s too much important stuff about air conditioning, building design and power management that IT really only has a sketchy understanding of.
IT won’t have talked about a unified, integrated approach to office design – you can’t expect it to - and if you asked your IT department to design a conduit for all the data switches, network switches and servers, then that’s exactly what it will do. It will put the server into the rack and put the racks in the computer room. But if you were to ask your IT director the optimum configuration to use, and how it is being or cooled, then you’ll get an incomplete answer, because that’s an area that most departments are not sufficiently aware of.
That’s not to say that some people in IT won’t get enjoy the responsibility of organising the office move. Some will like the opportunity of working on the new office design, and they may even make a passable job of it. Generally, it goes one of two ways, both of which are almost diametrically opposed to each other
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