One of the late 20th century’s most significant business trends, infrastructure integration is an idea whose time has come -- and with it, a new role for real estate.

Case in point: CIGNA corporate real estate’s (CRE) innovative Vision 3 Initiative, which merited a prestigious Best Practices Award from the International Development Research Council (IDRC), the world’s preeminent corporate real estate association, which has adopted Corporate Infrastructure Resource^SM Management (CIR) as part of its mission.

CIR’s promise has reached fruition at Philadelphia-based CIGNA (www.cigna.com), with real estate moving from the traditional concept of being a component in business to being an organizing principle of the business, says Robert Hamilton, CIGNA CRE vice president.

CRE embarked on the evolutionary Vision 3 program in 1997, extending the success of the Integrated Workplace Strategies (IWS) strategic entity it created in 1995.

Coming in on Little Cat’s Feet

It was an unabashedly ambitious plan: a cross-functional realignment to shift the organizational style from project- to process- driven. Wisely, those big ideas tiptoed in on little cat’s feet.

Anticipating inevitable cultural lag and knowing that some would see CIR as an alarming, revolutionary step, CRE took an informal, grassroots approach. It incorporated CIR into regular customer communications and began with manageable, measurable changes to sustain momentum.

But first CRE aligned itself with CIR, creating a concrete organizational model. It bulked up training and career and leadership development, and formed partnerships with the finance arms in information technology (IT) human resources (HR) and business finance. CRE finance client managers were assigned to each business unit, a major step toward integrating real estate financials into broader strategy.

Cognizant of measurement’s critical role, CRE developed benchmark databases to track cultural change. One includes factors like work and time utilization patterns, knowledge transfer, process mapping, and productivity enhancers and blocks. Related databases track productivity, worker output, and process-improvement and real estate costs.

Those databases yielded a critical benefit: point-of-work costing, identifying where work does, and should, occur to support long-term business goals and quantifying each point’s real estate and HR costs for each individual.

Pilot programs, implemented with CRE alliances with IT and HR, were part of the phase-in. One early pilot yielded solid traditional real estate results, cutting total space 16 percent and per-workstation costs 38 percent. But that pilot, Hamilton says, produced something broader and more substantive: a closer alignment between business goals and work patterns.

A Chorus of Customer Praise

Moving slowly and successfully, CRE’s well-thought-out plan steadily strengthened its perception as a valued strategic partner, eliciting a chorus of praise.

Kevin Barth, CIGNA Group Insurance vice president, credits "a highly responsive work environment [that] provides the appropriate work tools" for "achieving and maintaining high customer satisfaction and retaining the skill set critical to our continued success."

Byron Oliver, Retirement and Investment services president, credits CRE’s design of the retirement unit’s new headquarters for "faster decision-making and implementation."

With CIR, CRE’s role now has an anticipatory proactive aspect going well beyond site selections and lease renewal notifications. With its HR and IT partners, CRE offers business units complete economic analyses of how their location decisions fit the bigger business picture. Those analyses include how current work patterns align with future business goals, HR’s current and projected labor appraisals and IT’s evaluations of buildings’ technological capabilities. Analyses may even recommend a different market location as a better strategic fit.

Vision 1 is now "standard" for all projects, and many other projects are at the Vision 2 stage, says Hamilton. "We intend to claim Vision 3 by 2000."

Vision 3 has substantially reduced real estate costs, which can save millions, with every saved dollar directly boosting profit. But there’s much more at stake.

"Vision 3’s urgency escalates when you combine real estate savings with savings that can be realized through improved IT management, the soft costs related to enhanced HR management and the realignment of IT, HR and CRE roles," says IWS Director Lynne Kelley-Lewicki. "In fact, it soon becomes clear that the Vision 3 Initiative has the ability to enable the entire CIGNA organization to become a measurably more productive and profitable operation."     SS