Time To Get Personal?

Gartner has now recommended that employees buy their own laptops. There is nothing new in the concept, otherwise known as consumerisation. The idea is simple, employees buy and use their own hardware for work. In the US, it was the iPhone which has driven the move to consumerisation, lots of people rushed out to buy one and then asked their IT departments to support them. Here in lies one of the issues - support. The other one being licensing.

From a licensing perspective, who owns the software? Is it the company or the individual, what happens when they leave? From a support perspective what happens when a machine goes wrong? If there is a standard build, with a standard machine, then it is simple to fix or just to deliver a replacement. If it is down to the employee to get it fixed, do they do that on their own time? What happens if they don’t - laptops are an essential business tool if not available then productivity can drop to zero! What happens with backup? Who is responsible for doing it and how is it done? What about data loss prevention? If the machine has company information on it, what happens to it when the employee leaves?

There have been a number of successful schemes, but it is still early days. Before rushing in to save costs companies need to work through the issues and ensure that their corporate policies cover all eventualities.

 

June 18, 2008 | Filed Under Complexity, Consumerization 

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4 Responses to “Time To Get Personal?”

  1. Toby Stevens on June 18th, 2008

    Back in 2000 I worked for a US-owned ISP in Hong Kong. New employees were given HK$10,000 to kit themselves out with a laptop and any accessories they might need. That would cover a bog-standard Dell, but not a flashy Vaio or Apple, and we were welcome to top it up ourselves if we wished.

    The concerns about support and licensing are certainly valid, but in practice there was a huge payback on security, most notably theft - if you lost your laptop, that was your problem. No handouts, no excuses, just get yourself over to Kowloon and buy another one out of your own pocket. That really focussed people’s attention on looking after their kit, and in the time I was there we didn’t lose a single machine…

  2. Peter Dunkley on June 18th, 2008

    I think this trend may, in fact, cut support over the longer term. It might encourage the IT folks to keep things simple - and open. Who on Earth needs support for a mobile phone??

  3. Daniel Craig on June 21st, 2008

    Hello, I was looking around for a while searching for what is data encryption and I happened upon this site and your post regarding To Get Personal? : View From The Bunker, I will definitely this to my what is data encryption bookmarks!

  4. Guy Bunker on June 30th, 2008

    Who needs support for a mobile phone? I think the answer may depend on what sort of mobile phone you have (does it now do email and manage your calendar and contacts) and how critical it is to you being effective in your job. It might be that it is deemed a business risk for you to be without a phone (I certainly think that our sales reps would see it that way!) and so it is fitting that the company supports them - so that they remain effective - being able to provide replacement devices, etc, etc.

    The other area is in Data Loss Prevention - what happens when an employee leaves? If they have to hand in their phone, then the information on it is back within the company. If not, then is there a risk posed by not having it under company control? There should probably be a policy which provides a process to wipe company information from personal phones when a person leaves.

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