Should IT Shops Let Users Manage Their Own PCs?

An anonymous reader writes "Is letting users manage their own PCs an IT time-saver or time bomb waiting to happen? 'In this Web 2.0 self-service approach, IT knights employees with the responsibility for their own PC's life cycle. That's right: Workers select, configure, manage, and ultimately support their own systems, choosing the hardware and software they need to best perform their jobs.'" Do any of you do something similar to this in your workplace? Anyone think this is a spectacularly bad idea?

Comments

Re:Sure

[Otter]

Sounds like you should be in charge of OLPC 2! Just give those kids a fluorescent green plastic case, and they'll be taping out the CPUs of the future in no time!

As for the original topic: that's frequently how it is for corporate Mac users. You can have your machine, but don't expect IT to come in and break it for you like they do with the Windows computers.

Bad Idea

[dave562]

This entire subject is flamebait. Anyone who has actually worked in corporate IT knows that this is a STUPID idea. Of course this is Slashdot so you will get a lot of replies from developers and the like who want access to their own workstations. For the other 98% of the work force that uses computers, it is a bad idea to make the responsible. The large majority of corporate employees out there don't want the responsibility. They don't have the knowledge it takes to keep their computers up to date and running successfully. That is what IT is for. They do the grunt work to keep the enterprise running so that the secretaries can word process, so the financial types can play with Excel and so that everyone can use their custom applications to connect to the databases.

The place where letting users take care of their own workstations comes apart is when things go wrong. If everyone is installing their own programs you will never know what is causing the problem. As soon as it breaks the user who installed it, "Didn't do anything wrong, it just stopped working" and then the IT guy is supporting an application that he didn't install and doesn't use.

I'm of the opinion that if a user really NEEDS a piece of software becauase it is SO IMPORTANT TO THEIR JOB, then they can take the necessary steps to bring it to the attention of IT and wait a week or two for IT to evaluate it. I've yet to work in an IT department where REASONABLE requests were turned down.

The flip side of the coin is that if you let users have whatever you went, you end up with Kazaa/Limewire and a buttload of IM clients installed all over the network, along with Skype, browser toolbars, and who knows what kind of malware. Then you start getting calls from VP X who doesn't have program Y that cubicle monkey Z used to create the file. You have one department using some stupid third party plug-in for Office that nobody else in the company has and 'YOU HAVE TO UPDATE EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW' because they are working on some "IMPORTANT DEADLINE" that absolutely requires someone to have the plug-in.

This article should be relabelled, "Do I really have to do my job, or can I just quit and let the users do it for me?"