Smart offices requires smart buildings

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta

Smart people will function best in a smart environment. If these people are your employees and your main assets, you will need to provide them with a smart office to give them the chance to realize their true potential. This, in today's terms of knowledge workers, will include easy access to information, communications and automation.

In January this year, IBM and Steelcase introduced their concept for the Office of the Future, which they called BlueSpace. Coming from IBM, what else would it be called? The concept combined a comfortable workspace -- in which Steelcase has a lot of expertise and experience -- and advanced computers, sensors, displays and wireless technologies -- the bread and butter of IBM.

Not surprisingly, the new office design featured a lot of touchscreen capability, computer monitors so flexibly mounted they can be rotated to any degree to allow a user to sit anywhere in his or her workspace. In such a high-tech environment, the badge worn by an employee is not a visual-only ID card, it emits signals to sensors -- telling everyone else that its owner has already reported for work.

Once the signal is received, calls may be automatically directed to his or her phone, etc. If she or he is busy trying to finish a report for her or his afternoon meeting and does not want to be interrupted, a red light will tell coworkers to stay away.

These are just some of the features of the Office of the Future as envisioned by Big Blue and its partners. It is still a distant future for us in Indonesia, needless to say. However, some degree of such intelligence is already built into the work environment in the more technologically advanced places in the world.

In Hong Kong, for example, if things go as expected, people will be able to access the Internet wirelessly as their wireless ISP starts operating this year using the 802.11a standard, the South China Morning Post reported on March 28.

For knowledge workers, very few things could be more important than ready access to the Internet, which they use to find information and to communicate. So, in your office you must make sure that employees have quick access to the Internet. If you rent office space in a high-rise building, make sure that broadband Internet is one of the facilities provided by your landlord.

One of the intelligent buildings in Jakarta's central business district (CBD) that already offers this facility is MidPlaza (www.midplaza.com). These twin multistory office buildings feature a MidPlaza Information Network Interchange, or MINI, which provides tenants with high-speed Internet access and other Web services. It also offers a data center and collocation operation for your e-business.

In these buildings, tenants can easily install their own communication devices such as faxes and phones, as the building already has under-floor wiring systems connected to the buildings' up-to-date PABX equipment. Those who need to monitor breaking news will have access to the buildings' MATV system, which provides important global channels such as CNBC, NHK and CNN, as well as local TV stations.

Have you ever been on the 12th floor of a building and found that you had no signal on your cellular phone? Some buildings are not equipped with enough indoor antennas. You need to check this out -- using all the cellular phone services that are available today -- to make sure that the building has no blind spots.

Most important of all is a power source. All the smart devices in an intelligent building will not work without electricity. Fortunately, almost all high-rise buildings in Jakarta have their own generator, as they know they cannot rely 100 percent on our power company, PLN.

Another factor to consider is perhaps the location of the office building. No intelligent building would survive the kind of flooding that is still fresh in our memories if it was located much lower than its surroundings. All the intelligence built into a building would suddenly become meaningless if tenants could only get inside it by wading through murky water. Still, during normal times, intelligent people prefer intelligent offices in intelligent buildings.