Lookup columns do not work across site collection boundaries. This is by design and makes good sense considering that site collections can be placed in different content databases.
I can see two possible strategies to tackle your problem:
- Replicate data across site collections
- Keep data in one place and 'reference' data across site collections
I am sure there are many solutions for both strategies. So please do not regard the following examples as a complete list of possibilities.
Replicate data
You create a SharePoint list with the offices of your company, let's say in the root site collection of your SharePoint farm. You add a guid field to the offices list so that you have a unique and independent identifier for each entry in the list. You create an ItemAdded, ItemUpdated and ItemDeleted event receiver on that list to replicate these changes to 'consumer' lists in other site collections. In the 'consumer' site collections you can use standard SharePoint lookup columns within these site collections to reference data from the offices list.
An available solution for data replication might be this component (sync root list to a table in database and hook up 'consumer' lists to that table): http://www.layer2.de/en/products/Pages/SharePoint-Business-Data-List-Connector.aspx
Reference data
You can create a custom lookup field that can be used across site collections. In the lists in the 'consumer' site collection you use this field type to reference information from the offices list in the root site collection directly. You will definetly have to solve the issue how to update the referenced data, because your custom field will have to store a copy of the selected value (e.g. address) when the list item is created in the 'consumer' site collection.
An existing 3rd party solution for this could be the Cross-site lookup from SharePointBoost.
Update:
An OOTB approach to replicate the data could be to use the above mentioned Business Data List Connector component from Layer2 and hook that up to the RSS feed (feed.aspx) of the root list. The Layer2 component can consume XML files and the feed.aspx can be customized with an XSLT for the purpose.