The First Facility Management Blog

IFMA recently secured a group membership agreement with search engine giant Google that has led to 27 of the company’s facility managers joining the association.

Google facility professionals from countries including Argentina, Brazil, China, India, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, Spain, Russia and the United Kingdom — as well as the United States — are now IFMA members. Google has plans to expand this to include all the facility managers it employs.

“It means a lot to us to have representatives from such a prestigious, global company join our association,” said Amy Campbell, IFMA membership development manager. “In time, we hope to have all of Google’s facility professionals join the IFMA family.”

For more information about IFMA membership, visit http://www.ifma.org/membership/index.cfm.

Google, the world’s most popular search engine, is often revered (and reviled) for its Street View images, which offer anyone with an Internet connection direct access to detailed photos of homes and buildings around the world.

But do these images pose a security threat?

A recent FM World poll found that the vast majority of facility professionals think they do not. The poll asked 100 facility practitioners if they “see Google Street View as a potential security threat in any way” to their organization.

Their answer was largely no. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they did not see the search engine’s images as threatening, with the remaining 29 percent saying they did.

One respondent said, “There’s nothing to stop a thief driving past with their phone video on to get the same, even more up-to-date, footage.” While another asked, “Who is really interested in this footage except for burglars? Isn’t our privacy invaded enough already?”

The second respondent has a point. While Google Street View might not pose any more of a security threat than other, more accessible forms of technology can produce, what real purpose does it serve? What is to be gained from looking at the front of the neighbor’s house, or the hospital or school up the road, beyond a voyeuristic thrill, or possibly, something worse? Nothing.

Even more of an invasion of privacy is Google’s Satellite View, which offers viewers plenty of top-down satellite imagery of homes and buildings everywhere, extending into their private property. Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney famously had his own vice presidential home pixelated and obscured in these Google images, a move U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has since reversed.

But perhaps Cheney had a point. Views such as those offered by Google can, when used improperly, result in not only an invasion of privacy, but also a security threat. As both private citizens and people with an interest in facilities, we have a duty to fight things that encroach on our freedoms and jeopardize our safety. And maybe Google crosses the line.

What do you think?

Outgoing students from Sutton Grammar School went to new lengths to pull off a rude, but imaginative joke. The joke, which was unspotted for years, proved to be an amusing exercise in engineering and spelling, but unfortunately, it was for dubious purposes. It was recently discovered by Google Earth.

TransWorldNews reports:

Several students used bricks to spell out the word “C**K” on the school’s roof. The prank went unnoticed for years until it was spotted on Google Earth. The head of the Surrey school, Gordon Ironside, is having the bricks removed.

“It was a light-hearted act. But I’d prefer it wasn’t there - or if it wasn’t rude,” Ironside says.

 

On a personal note, my son graduated from high school this week, and of course, his class couldn’t resist its own parting prank. Apparently, members of the Ocean Township High School Class of 2009 thought it would be amusing to rearrange the library…not the furniture, but the books. Fiction was swapped with non-fiction, and Dewey Decimal organizational systems were tossed aside. Fingers crossed that my offspring took no part in this prank. Innocent until proven guilty, right? Note to facility managers in education: make sure you have CCTV in your libraries! When compared to the Sutton Grammar School, this sounds tame (but it will probably take much more time to undo).

This Friday Funny was provided by Mike Christian.

This article comes courtesy of Yahoo!Tech and CNET:

Step aside, keyboards, laptops, and 9 to 5 jobs. A survey of more than 1,000 Internet activists, journalists, and technologists released Sunday speculates that by 2012, those quaint relics of 20th century life will fade away.

It’s not a formal survey of the sort that, say, political pollsters use. Nor are computer journalists especially known for their prognosticative abilities. Still, the Pew Internet and American Life Project hopes the effort will provide a glimpse of the best current thinking about how online life will evolve in the next decade or so.

Lee Rainie and the other Pew researchers asked their survey respondents to respond to a series of questions about 2020 future scenarios, including whether the mobile phone will be the “primary” Internet connection (most agreed), whether copy protection will flourish (most disagreed), and whether transparency “heightens individual integrity and forgiveness (evenly split).

The rough consensus was that “few lines divide professional time from personal time,” and that professionals are happy with the way work and play are “seamlessly integrated in most of these workers’ lives.”

Another, which also met with broad agreement: “Talk and touch are common technology interfaces. People have adjusted to hearing individuals dictating information in public to their computing devices. In addition ‘haptic’ technologies based on touch feedback have been fully developed, so, for instance, a small handheld Internet appliance allows you to display and use a full size virtual keyboard on any flat surface for those moments when you would prefer not to talk aloud to your networked computer.”

One respondent was Google chief economist Hal Varian, who said: “The big problem with the cell phone is the (user interface), particularly on the data side. We are waiting for a breakthrough.”

It’s easier to read the report itself, which you can find here (PDF). This is Pew’s third report in the series; further reading can be found in its 2005 first survey (PDF) and 2006 second survey (PDF).

The meeting eggs are used for...well...meetings, of course (not re-enactments of pod monster births a la "Aliens")

Everyone has heard about working at Google. It’s fun! It’s wacky! It has sliding boards, pool tables, and unimaginable perks. Here’s the (tamed down) overview of the work environment, courtesy of the Google Web site:

Google provides a fun and flexible working environment with perks that are designed to make life easier and more convenient for employees to manage their life-work balance. Local benefits may vary by location, but one thing that remains constant within Google is that we put employees first. Whether it’s perks like massages or onsite gyms to just help you relax and feel good, or more essential benefits like comprehensive health coverage – Google proves that there still is such a thing as a free lunch (and breakfast, and dinner).

Google has been voted one of the best companies to work for by various publications, including topping Fortune Magazine’s Best Places to Work and British Computer Society’s Women in IT lists, Best Companies to Work For in Ireland, UK’s Times Most Progressive Employer, Best Workplaces for Commuters by the Environmental Protection Agency, and consistent top ranking on the Corporate Equality Index by the Human Rights Campaign in the U.S.

The water lounge gives the engineers a place to relax among the aquariums and massage chairs

But based on an e-mail circulating over the summer, the fun and flexible environment in Google may be considered slightly excessive, at least in the opinion of some more conservative minded facility managers. The following photos illustrate the working conditions in Google’s European Engineering Center in Zurich, Switzerland.

The quickest (but perhaps not so dignified) way to the employee cafeteria is the sliding board.

Check out this brief movie from Nicholas Carlson, who prefers to take the fire pole from floor to floor when he visits other offices. Stairs are so passe, you know.