Capital One's approach to a new, smarter workplace provides lessons and advice for IT and corporate leaders looking to create more productivity and efficiency.

Peter High's World Class IT:Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs (Wiley, 2009) was one of the best IT-business books in recent memory, primarily because of its comprehensive view of what it takes to build a truly stellar IT organization. High, founder and president of Metis Strategy, a strategic consulting firm, bases his book on five core principles essential to success.

In this excerpt, High introduces Principle No. 1: People. His description of how former Capital One CIO Gregor Bailar built a new workplace environment shows how companies and IT organizations can find greater success when they focus on their people's needs.

For more on Bailar's "people" philosophy, check out this podcast interview with High.

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In 2005, Gregor Bailar, then the executive vice president and CIO of Capital One, realized that the development of a new corporate campus in Richmond, Virginia, provided the company an opportunity to think differently about the way in which employees worked. Collaborating with the facilities organization and human resources, Bailar developed a new approach that he termed the “Future of Work.” Bailar gave up an office and suggested that others do the same. Instead of assigned offices and cubicles, Capital One developed an open office environment with few walls and plenty of sunlight. People were encouraged to sit in teams, so that colleagues who had reason to collaborate on a regular basis could readily do so.

As Bailar describes it, “Facilities folks and the HR folks saw that buildings were not being used in the same way that they had been. Offices and cubicles remained empty while people crowded into the few conference rooms that were available. Managers and employees were having a different relationship because employees were going from one project to the next, perhaps many in one year. There was a change in the way that people actually worked on projects.”

To Bailar’s and other executives’ delight, this decision ended up paying big dividends for the company. Innovation actually increased as a result of consolidating teams in this fashion. Collaboration was enhanced, meetings were made more efficient, and, ultimately, productivity and employee satisfaction rose. In addition, the company was able to save money on real estate, as less office space was necessary, and the paper and document management costs also decreased due to the implementation of better electronic data storage since people literally had less space to store papers without dedicated offices and cubicles.

Technology was a large part of the story. To ensure the people could work in such a flexible fashion, they needed to have reliable wi-fi connections s that their PCs would be operable anywhere. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones were put in place. Also, the improvements in document management allowed people to access information from almost anywhere.

This is a trend that is starting to take shape to a greater degree, but will likely increase as more companies look to find ways to enhance the productivity of their staffs while also lowering costs. This is a chance that IT can help push that will help both the top line (through greater innovation) and the bottom line (through cost savings).

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When Technology Triumphs, by Peter High. Copyright (c)  2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.  All rights reserved.

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