According to a Gartner prediction, by 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT
assets, like PCs and laptops. These will be transferred to third parties, one of
which would be the company's own employees. While we wait for the ultimate fate
of this prediction, let's debate the pros and cons of this.
On the positive side of things, this can certainly help cut down on the
company's hardware spends, and the savings could be used for other, more
strategic projects. Employees also benefit from it as they get to own a PC or
laptop in easy to pay monthly EMIs, which automatically get deducted from their
salaries. With PCs at home and laptops on the move, this would also encourage
employees to work from home, on the road, etc. As more employees start tele-commuting,
it would further cut down the company's daily expenses, like electricity
consumption, other miscellaneous expenditure, etc.
While this seems like a win-win situation for all, there are downsides to it
as well. Once the transfer happens, employees would want to use the PCs and
laptops for their personal work as well, besides company work. This could lead
to data security issues. The employees would also want to access the Internet in
their free time, and there would be no control over which sites they access.
This could lead to increased malware infections on machines. Then, as more
employees work from outside office, you would have to provide them Internet
connectivity-data cards for laptops and broadband for PCs at home. And if an
employee leaves, what happens to all the licensed software loaded on his
machine?
There's a cost attached to all these downsides, which would have to be
compared against the savings that would result by transferring the ownership.
For instance, the company could build the cost of basic software like Office
Suite, anti-virus, etc into the EMI. For other business critical software, the
company would have to figure out a way to uninstall it from the exiting
employee's machine and install it on the machine of the new person who joins.
More security solutions would have to be deployed on the company's network to
prevent malware infections coming in from the personal laptops, and office PCs
connecting over VPN. Separate profiles would have to be created on those
machines, which would be allowed to login to the company network. The company
could also consider setting up a virtual desktop infrastructure, wherein the
company's desktop would run remotely from the data center. This would further
add to the cost.
Lastly, what about the individual employee preferences on what model would
they like to buy? Apart from other things, HR issues like ego clashes between
employees at different levels in the organization would also have to be
resolved.
What's your take? Do write back to me with your views on the subject!
Anil Chopra,
Editoranilc@cybermedia.co.in