CoreNet Global Chairman Mark Tamburro, VP of Workplace Resources at Nokia, sees it as "portfolio capability," or an alignment of resources and assets to drive the corporate business plan. It's about increasing flexibility and competitive advantage. It's about "making bricks and mortar agile," Tamburro observed recently to the CoreNet Global Research Council.

Just like their colleagues in the other age groups - Traditionalists, Baby Boomers and Generation X - the Millennials, or 'Generation Y,' will see their employers using the CRE portfolio as the central link to the workforce, working environments, mobility and other solutions.

"It's not a choice, it's a necessity," insists Rachel K. Park about the critical need for companies to approach the workplace and other portfolio features with a life-cycle management view.

For Millennials, she adds, this means "they're not picking or choosing" these solutions. "They're for everyone - it's a common platform."

Park, who is a strategic facilities planning specialist for CUH2A, a leading science and technology design firm with major emphasis on knowledge workers and talent, has been studying the workplace for 20 years.

Demographic influences are stronger than ever, but the business case for sustainability, mobility, collaboration - and all of the other attributes that Millennials are supposedly dictating - remains at the top of the hierarchy, she believes.

"There are two approaches to asset management," Park relates. "One views facilities as a strategic tool to support business strategies; the other considers facilities an expensive necessity."

Still, it's all good, because the former enables the working world that Millennials want, and guess what? More and more companies have figured out they'd better migrate to the strategic view, or lose talent, product innovation, market penetration, customers, reputation and competitive advantage.

It ties back to our now-predominant Information-Age business model: the globally networked enterprise.

Intellectual capital and knowledge workers are the centerpiece of the model, so that "talented employees will always be part of the equation," offers Ken Ashley, MCR, who works in Cushman & Wakefield's Atlanta tenant services group.

"As we investigate alternative workplace strategies," Ashley advises, "we have to be cognizant that we're trying to attract and retain talent of multiple age groups, and that we may have to spend some time to observe the hot buttons of each of those workforce segments."

As the now-almost-countless number of cases continues to show, when it's done well, AWS can have some incredible effects.

"It's really exciting to me how what we do affects our clients' output," Rachel Park says. "Whether they discover new drugs, like Pfizer, or new technology, like AT&T, it's the workplace and facility solutions which positively affect both the way they work and their creativity."

Still, creativity and collaboration need a sound business case.

"AWS are driven in large measure by micro-economic factors like continued cost cutting by CFO's," notes Ken Ashley. Another factor, especially in the current slowdown and concerns over the higher cost of financing projects and capital, is "corporate real estate's desire to demonstrate results in a rising rate environment."

Like other industry observers, Ashley sees current economic uncertainty and sluggish conditions as cooling the demand for talent as hiring rates also slow.

But the long-term take on demographics is that they will continue to exert their influence.

Workplace expert Frank Becker of Cornell University recently told CoreNet Global's Workplace Community, "Demographics will have enormous impact over the next 10 years." Becker is the co-author of CoreNet Global's seminal Corporate Real Estate (CRE) 2000 research opus, The Changing Nature of Work and the Workplace, published in 1995.

That impact, however, won't stem exclusively from Millennials. Rather, as Becker also advised, it's a matter of "balancing competing (work) environments of the young and old."