Abstracts of recent major presentations of the International Development Research Council (IDRC), the world's preeminent corporate real estate association.

"The Strategic Perspective for Corporate Infrastructure Resource Management," a Workshop Presentation as the IDRC New England World Congress, Apr. 26, 1999: This workshop plumbed one of the industry's more important issues: how to systematically devise concrete management strategies to optimally align business planning with corporate infrastructure integration.

"Your mission [in strategically approaching corporate infrastructure resource management] is to use corporate resources wisely to provide tools and encouragement for employees to work how, when and where they are most effective," Froggatt Consulting's Cynthia C. Froggatt told the workshop audience, After outlining the business conditions and initiatives that spur infrastructure integration, Froggatt stressed the importance in that process of assigning company-wide roles and employing scenario planning -- using "gap analysis" to determine the difference between "potential supply and potential demand."

A key step in strategically approaching integration infrastructure, Peregine Systems' Nancy Johnson Sanquist stressed in part two of the workshop, is "an infrastructure investment portfolio analysis," including "how much you have invested in physical space and cyberspace and where it is invested. A lot of people are saying, 'We don't know where our IT assets are.' " Corporate infrastructure integration teams, Sanquist suggested, should take a "balanced scorecard approach," establishing business valuation measures that include both financial and operational standards. A major step in implementing such a system, she said, lies in moving from "place-centric" to "people-centric" accounting. *

"Empires of the Mind: How to Lead and Succeed in a Knowledge-Based World," a Keynote Address by Denis Waitley; IDRC New England World Congress, Apr. 25, 1999: Business guru and author of the bestseller Empires of the Mind, Waitley told his keynote address audience, "The empires of the future will not be bricks-and-mortar. They will be in the mind."

That change, Waitley explained, is being driven by the relentless, technology-fueled explosion of new knowledge.

"The useful life span of a formal education is now only 18 months," he said. "Every five minutes, a new technological innovation is being invented. So you must gain expertise, but today you never really become an expert."

Personal values like "honesty, integrity and wisdom" will be what endures in today's change-wracked environment, Waitley said.

Traditional physical workplaces, he added, will still exist in the future, but with a changed emphasis. "What will be important is how the corporate infrastructure works together," Waitley said. *

* denotes summary presentation available on Web     SS