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March 20, 2000 When Ernst & Young LLP consultants want to spend time in the office, they have to make reservations. With most of its workforce on the road or permanently assigned to client sites, the Cleveland-headquartered Big Five accounting and management consulting firm saves money by eliminating traditional individual offices and operating a hoteling infrastructure.
A way to share office space among employees who are usually out of the office, hoteling involves building generic offices that anyone can use on request. A reservation system assigns space to employees, and networking software gives them access to corporate resources. The concept may also be used at companies with project-oriented cultures, where workers form temporary teams for days or months to tackle particular jobs.
Hoteling enjoyed a flavor-of-the-month celebrity in 1996 and 1997, with whole companies unscrewing nameplates from doors and switching to temporary landing slots. But large-scale hoteling proved unwieldy and unwanted, and most of the experimenters reverted to the typical permanently assigned office or cubicle. "I don't think hoteling has worked that well, by and large," says Kazim Isfahani, an analyst at Giga Information Group Inc. in Norwalk, Conn. "I haven't seen that many shining examples of it."
Hoteling isn't something that FFE Transportation Services Inc. in Dallas needs, says Allen Woody, MIS systems manager. The trucking business really requires more centralized operations -- and employees, he says.
"There are a lot of companies which can benefit from (hoteling). Unfortunately, I don't think we're one of them. . . . We have sort of a bull-pen environment, where you might have eight or 10 dispatchers working together, and they need to be able to communicate very quickly with one another, like over a 3-foot wall."
What hoteling experiments proved, however, is that the concept has traction for certain corporate cultures and types of employees. Small-scale hoteling, where an office supports a few work spaces, is fairly common.
General Dynamics Corp.'s Electronic Systems Division in Colorado Springs maintains a few cubicles for visitors in a work area that supports 80 employees, says Frank Loccisano, deputy product support manager for collaborative products and technologies.
The company will expand its hoteling efforts, in part, because of the number of telecommuting employees. "The whole point behind this is to cut costs or to limit the overhead as much as possible," Loccisano says.
Hotel Check-In
One reason the wholesale hoteling initiatives failed is that in most organizations, the majority of the workers stay at the office. A Computerworld survey conducted last month of 87 readers who practice hoteling found that in 76% of organizations that offer hoteling, at least 90% of employees had permanent office space.
So who

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