BYOL - Ever fought with the IT security department to use your personal laptop at work, or on the road (and tell me, who wants to carry two laptops? If you walk to work, you’d use a trolley bag to work and people start asking you where you are going.)

Basically treat the employee’s laptop as you would treat the employees’s pants: require it, pay the employee enough to buy it, and provide the infrastructure that works with it, but that’s all. Give the employee the price of one laptop per two years, plus, say, the price of one major troubleshooting session per six months.

Interesting idea, of course with many pros and cons. Unfortunately, most people can’t take care of their laptops. They drop them and smash the screen, they get stolen of the back seat of the car (seriously, would you leave your own laptop on the backseat?), they install software that comes with a box of cereal for their kids to play games or allow the malware Hotbar to be installed.

However, some of these could be prevented by putting the onus on the individual stating that this is your laptop and is your property and not that of the company. It wont stop the software issues, but one would think it would reduce the numbers that are stolen or damaged.

Another schoolf of thought is that one would think that the company be providing the tools needed to do the work (as long as work is not being done by a contractor)? If one loses their tools, they break or wear out then shouldn’t the company provide a replacement ASAP?

I can also see the tech support staff about to tear their hair out with the number of calls made regarding stupid user behaviour and non-standardised configurations. Then again, non-standard cofigurations are the realm of many ISPs as they determine how their customers have set up the computer with case-based reasoning. You just hope that after their six monthly health-check, they don’t fill up their hard disc the next day and wonder why they can’t save any files. (Via Kottke)