December 23, 2005

More on Employee Owned Notebooks

I wrote earlier that Gartner predicts more companies will have employees buying their own computers. However, TechTarget writes further on this and gives a best practice from AXA Advisors.

TechTarget writes For some time now, employees have either owned their laptops or leased them from the company, said Thomas Pfeiffer, a technical consultant at the New York City-based financial services firm. The arrangement has lightened IT's administrative load somewhat: "When an employee has hardware problems, if he drops a machine or cracks a screen, he goes to the vendor's support organization rather than our help desk," Pfeiffer said.

But employee-installed software has caused more problems than anticipated, he said. Employee-installed software has "collided" with, and then damaged authorized, work-related notebook applications. End users have changed network settings, causing mobile devices to drop out of AXA's Active Domain network. They've reconfigured the operating system, causing it to crash. Web downloads have spread spam and malware across the corporate network.

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