Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Wednesday, April 10, 2002

Cubicle Culture: In Office of the Future, We'll All Be Scanned Like a Can of Peas

By Suein L. Hwang

ONCE CONFINED TO supermarket shelves, overnight mail and certain herds of cattle, barcodes are now hitting the rest of us where we live: at work.

For a first-hand look at this new world behind bars, I head to Accenture's "office of the future" in Reston, Va. There, I'm led by a barcode-wearing "office operations manager" for the big consulting firm to a six-by-six foot cubicle on the fourth floor. Pasted on the olive fabric partition is another zebra stripe familiar to supermarket shoppers. In fact, every employee and every workspace here has a barcode.

Whether its supermarkets or consulting firms, the motivation behind barcodes is the same: money. "Everyone's gone through cost-cutting their expenses," says John Loehr, director of facilities and services. "What's left?"

Accenture needs barcodes because nobody in this office has an office. Instead, its 2,400 workers must reserve one of the 735 open (cubicle) or 225 closed (office) spaces in advance

The barcodes allow clerks to figure out which "tote," each containing a worker's files, should be moved to which space the evening before. They also help ensure that peripatetic workers get their mail. Accenture thus eliminates the need for permanent offices so often left empty by consultants working at client sites. The company estimates it saves $8 million in rent.

BACK ON THE fourth floor, I press two green buttons on a specially equipped Palm. A flick of my wrist over the barcode and beep-beep, Accenture's computer system knows I've moved a file tote to office space "436-closed." When packages are delivered, clerks can grab barcodes on ID tags dangling from employees' necks and beep-beep, Accenture knows packages have reached the intended recipients.

It was just 28 years ago that a pack of Wrigley's chewing gum became the first object scanned at a Troy, Ohio, supermarket. That the inscrutable patches of black lines and tiny digits are now showing up in offices and on workers is a mark of corporations' relentless quest for order among the last disorderly element left in many businesses: people.

"A can of peas has its own barcode, why not us?" reasons Doug Picker of Symbol Technologies, which sells mobile barcode systems.

Human barcodes offer an end-to-end solution. This fall, Miami Children's Hospital plans to furnish its tiny patients with barcoded ID bracelets to track medications. Inspired by New York's ground zero, the Centers for Disease Control is aiming to barcode samples and field evidence after an outbreak or attack.

Human barcodes are also hip. Heavy-metal band Slipknot has a barcode logo, with the stripes emblazoned across their prison-jumpsuit outfits. Barcode tattoos are also big, says New York tattoo tycoon Carlo Fodera.

In offices, barcodes are proliferating on desks, computers, cubicle partitions, and chairs (look under yours). Starting from scratch four years ago, SC Logic sold $4 million worth of barcoded mail systems last year to a client list that includes Accenture and big banks, law firms and drug companies.

UNLIKE CANNED FOOD, office workers sometimes bridle at barcodes. A few of Accenture's workers got downright ornery about the barcode-enabled culture, particularly the timesharing cubicles. "It was a painful experience," Mr. Loehr concedes.

He says that thanks in part to the building's 20,000 barcodes, the average occupancy rates of the Reston's office averages 80%, compared with just 60% in the New York office. "Every empty office is a waste of a company's money," says Mr. Loehr, a hotel-industry veteran who is planning the conversion of the New York space.

Accenture's program is so popular with its corporate clientele, the firm trained its service coordinators to give outsiders a comprehensive tour, and is selling its office of the future concept to its client base.

I am writing this from my office, a cubicle of my very own in San Francisco. My cubicle has a name -- a purchasing manager tells me it's in the Steelcase 9000 family; it's a beige color bafflingly called "sepia." Except for my stuffed lobster and googly-eyed gorilla it's indistinguishable from millions like it. We struggle for individuality in an ever-more efficient universe of identification tags, laptops and voicemail codes.

It is that reality that inspires this column. Corporations have created a cubicle culture sillier, stranger and scarier than anything we could make up. Sometimes I'll look at the literal boxes we sit in, sometimes the metaphorical ones that confine our lives. As for my box, it isn't barcoded -- not yet, anyway.

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