My PC?

I often wonder whether the glorious “PC Revolution” has left us with more bad habits than good. There is no doubt its introduction of freedom into the world of computing has taken us on a marvellous world of discovery which has expanded into places we would never have gone if they hadn’t existed. But, I always worry about the other side of “progress”.

In the world of corporate IT we have spent many years reigning in the "freedom" of the PC in order to regain fiscal control of a distributed PC environment. Any attempts at doing this has tended to be met by walls of descent from PC users who love that they can do what the hell they like when they like.

Many years ago I came up with a mantra which I used as I led a very thorny roll-out of a “managed PC environment” across a struggling Ozzy airline. The shock of this new regime was needed to reduce their astronomic management costs.

The mantra was:

“My PC is a business tool, supplied by and paid for by my employer – it is not an extension of my personality.”

Now I'm not sure if I stole this from someone else (wouldn’t surprise me!), but I think it should be one of the major battle cries of our industry. It would make things far simpler and maybe help explain that there does need to be a level of compromise between what you do with a PC at home - your problem, and what you do at work – our problem.

There has never been a better place to see this in action than in the ranks of senior management. They continue to demand special rights to exceptions over the rules they demand of their workforce (reduce costs!). How many times have I seen senior executives demanding that they have laptops that exceed the company standard – if they had heard the mantra maybe they wouldn’t be so pushy – or would they?