In the not too distant past, when a company decided to relocate— into either a new or retrofitted building—technology concerns often took a back seat to issues such as cost, location and design. It was more or less assumed that technology was infinitely flexible and could be accommodated in just about any setting.

Today, however, as tech demands grow ever more complex and more important to the bottom line, CIOs are finding that it pays to be actively involved in corporate real estate decisions from the very beginning. By doing so, they not only have the opportunity to tailor the design of a new facility to meet their company’s current and future technology needs, they also are able to do so at a time when it is relatively easy to make changes: on paper and before construction has started.

Nowhere is this trend better demonstrated than at Kirkland & Ellis, an international law firm that has its largest office in Chicago. Two years ago, Kirkland—which has been located in the Aon Center in downtown Chicago for more than 30 years—signed on to be the anchor tenant in a new 1.3 million-square-foot office tower being developed by Hines on LaSalle Street just north of the Chicago River.

Since then, Kirkland CIO Steve Novak has played a leading role in making sure the building conforms to the needs of the company’s tech program.

“We recognized from the very beginning that tech needed to be at the table when decisions about the new building were being made,” he says. “That’s a key shift in thinking for us but also, I think, for nontechnology companies in general.”

Novak first got involved at an earlier stage when the firm was evaluating its options and, indeed, tech requirements proved to be a key factor in the ultimate decision to go into a new facility rather than renovate the existing one. “Technology was an extremely significant part of our decision to move,” says Gregg Kirchoefer, a Kirkland partner and chairman of the firm’s tech committee, which assisted in the transition process. “Our current building, which dates from the 1970s, was fabulous for its period but obviously wasn’t designed to accommodate the systems and technology we have today, and the costs of making it a world-class facility were prohibitive.”

“We were literally running out of space to install cable,” says Novak. “At one point, the riser rooms were full and we were running cable through mail chutes and any other space we could find.” (Riser rooms, or riser closets, are small rooms—about 80 square feet—that house wiring and utility equipment.)