Don Marti

Sat 22 Apr 2006 12:23:57 AM PDT

BYOL?

Meme floating around the IT-analyst-o-sphere: "bring your own laptop." Basically treat the employee's laptop as you would treat the employees's pants: require it, pay the employee enough to buy it, and provide the infrastructure that works with it, but that's all. Give the employee the price of one laptop per two years, plus, say, the price of one major troubleshooting session per six months.

There's a lot to like about this idea, although I suspect part of the cost savings would come from getting free first-level support from employee spouses. (We did this at Linux Journal, and it worked great, but Linux magazine editors are supposed to spend time messing around with new software, so that shouldn't count.)