If your company were to transfer the ownership of the PC or laptop issued to you, in easy to pay monthly EMIs, would you take it?

Mostly yes, depending about the performance of the system

I'm not talking about organizations auctioning off their old systems to employees. I'm referring to fresh purchases.

Apparently, according to Gartner, by 2012, 20% of companies will own no IT assets, like notebooks and PCs. They will transfer them to third parties, and employees is one option. This would help reduce the capex, and at the same time, help the employees also.

rgds,
Anil

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.