Fidelity Center for Applied Technology Boston, Massachusetts, USA Fidelity is the largest mutual fund company in the US and the Fidelity Group with its subsidiaries is one of the world's largest independent mutual fund service providers. The number of employees at Fidelity jumped from 2,000 in 1983 to current 35,000, counting as many as 17 million customers. Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) was founded in 1999, to filter through leading-edge technologies to find the technologies and tools that maximize benefit to Fidelity's business. Skilled staff and facilities are assembled at FCAT, making it the IT-center of Fidelity. Two special considerations were made in creating this center: to build a quiet space where workers can concentrate and to make the space open to assure free collaboration among workers. The percentage of private offices is 35%, which is higher than the Fidelity average (10%). Each worker is assigned to an 8 x 8 workstation, and is entitled to a private office on assignment basis. On the other hand, in hopes of promoting spontaneous communication, half of the office was made public space, even by eliminating the executives’ spaces. The hallways are wider, and besides the five main conference rooms, small meeting rooms for 4 to 6 people are placed throughout the center. Consideration is made to make sure this environment does not diverge too much from Fidelity's norms, since technologies developed here must be immediately applicable to other sites. In designing the Center, the project team aggressively gathered inputs from users. At FCAT, which is not based on non-territorial concept, each worker has his or her own home base. FCAT places importance not only on virtual organizations but also on physical relationships in the teams, neighborhoods and departments. If people work in a physical space, their relocation is also physical. At Fidelity, organizations are frequently restructured or contracted under a slogan 'New business immediately leads to physical moves.' In this respect, too, FCAT is an experimenting test site for the entire Fidelity. An experiment carried out here is frequently applied to other sites on a larger scale. All the furniture is freestanding to facilitate frequent moves and layout reconfigurations.           Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA     Move-In Date: 1999.9     Floor Area: 4,180 m2     Workforce: 150     Building Design:     Interior Design: Fidelity Project Team & DEGW     Interview Date: 2001.6