[I]t’s no longer practical to have a centralized IT operation, where city governments design and build large-scale computer programs that can take years to implement, are rarely delivered on time and are often over budget. Instead, Keene wants cities to break up big technology projects into more manageable pieces that can be built more quickly, an idea called “agile development” that is already a growing trend in public sector IT. Keene also wants cities to rely less on expensive hardware and take advantage of cloud computing. “We’re moving everything we can into the cloud,” he says. “It’s absurd to keep maintaining all those server farms.”

Source: Words of IT Wisdom From Silicon Valley to Governments

That same decentralization principle also applies to the knowledge workplace. It no longer makes sense to have knowledge workers assemble daily in a centralized, commute-in office. Just as information and communications technology has outmoded the proprietary, on premise server, it has also obsoleted the office building as knowledge work becomes an activity that can be performed anywhere with a decent Internet connection to the server cloud.