Keller located new work spaces for all displaced employees within a week, helping the company to continue publishing the The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and its online content uninterrupted.

Keller credits her integrated workplace management system from Archibus Inc. in Boston. "We've become the librarians of lots of information about what the company has, where people are working, what physical assets they're working with and what it will take to move them," she says.

Although extreme, Keller's experience illustrates the benefits these applications can produce. Users say they help them more quickly respond to changes, more accurately compile information needed for real estate decisions and better forecast space requirements -- all of which can save companies millions of dollars through increased productivity and reduced real estate costs.

Even so, CIOs have not been clamoring for these applications. In fact, facilities managers, vendor executives and market analysts all say that IT has overlooked this area and only recently started to champion technology improvements for managing corporate real estate. "It's been somewhat of an orphaned function," says Michael Bell, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Bell says that facilities management systems used to be fragmented and departmental, so many IT shops took a hands-off approach. IT allowed facilities staffers to choose their own software and, in some cases, their own outside vendors to support it.