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

Goose versus Gander

[Nakito]

In the days when I was on a large network, I thought it was a bad practice for the IT department to have better setups than the end users. Some IT people had not just faster computers but leaner images with less integration and less overhead. Their machines flew.

But of course they had no appreciation of how bad it was to be in the trenches. Their computers performed so much better than the equivalent computers of the end users that they often did not realize how hard it was to get work done on a standard image.

When I reached the point where I ran one of the departments, I kept an old standard-image computer as my main computer and made sure I was always at the end of the upgrade queue. My view was that if something worked well on my computer, it would work on anyone's. And if something didn't work well on my computer, then it meant some of my users were having a bad experience.

So maybe if the IT department would just use the same image and hardware as the end users, they'd know enough to provide a decent standard image, which would solve a lot of user complaints.

Re:in the perfect world...

[mapsjanhere]

People in my shop can tell me what they want hardware wise, but most don't get more than user privileges. For a while I told people they can put anything on their machines as long as they drop off a license, but it just didn't work. Too many people bringing in "free but for commercial use" programs and running them in total disregard of the real licenses. Even worse, one guy brings it in after buying a registration, but 10 people copy it assuming "if he has it, it must be ok". Plus, my time needed for TLC due to user error has gone from 10h/week to 2h/month since all machines are locked down. Selfish bastard of IT guy!