ABSTRACT
Architects, facility managers and corporate real estate agents must regularly wake up in a cold sweat at night. More and more businessmen and women rely heavily, sometimes solely, on information-gathering and communications technology, such as laptops and mobile phones, to support their business activities. The increasing mobility of these appliances gives them the opportunity to spend more time ‘on the job’, which is increasingly outside the conventional office. This migration and mobility of the work force must cause apprehension, if not sheer anxiety, to those professionals whose very existence depends on developing, designing and maintaining corporate office buildings. It is almost trivial to state that technological developments are moving at Internet speed. The well known principle of change in the computer industry called Moore’s law, laid down by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, states that the capacity of semiconductors will double every 18 months and that the price of computing power will halve every 18 months. Facing this kind of reality, many real-estate related professionals, are left perplexed and confused-or they simply try to ignore what is happening. Change is the buzzword of the eBusiness environment; and architecture, or the very act of building, seems to be an acronym of change.
