Bring Your Own Laptop To Work?

Don Marti blogged an idea that’s been floating around for a while: what if, instead of corporate IT supplying you a desktop which is largely underutilized, the company paid you a “laptop allowance” of some sort and you brought/brought your own? While it’s less feasible in the CG industry (those desktops are makin’ pixels, so we need ‘em around and all ;), it makes great sense in all sorts of other contexts – and was something I was begging for ca. 2000 when I was a “pre-sales technical consultant.”

There’s heated discussion in the comments of Don’s post which largely divides into “Right On!” and “IT’s Worst Nightmare.” Most of the latter seem to miss Don’s point: the user owns the laptop; IT supplies and supports only the services (network connection, DHCP for IP address and pointers to directory services such as DNS and LDAP, etc.) Users get some amount of free tech support per year (Don suggests “two major incidents” where I’d suggest one hour per week which accumulates with a 16 hour cap); after that, some sort of billing kicks in, either to the user or to their department.

In the end you have positive motivation (“I get to choose!”) and negative motivation (“That’s gonna cost me …”). Sounds like a good closed system to me.

Link: Don Marti business/byol.html.