Ah, the venerable beige box-one beneath every desk in corporate America before manufacturers discovered the color "black" and got all trendy on us. But perhaps no longer, according to Gartner by way of this ComputerWorld article. Corporate America, it seems, is getting ready to turn its back on the beige box and turn PC procurement over to their individual employees.

With the transition to widespread utilization of web-based applications and virtual computer environments, the thinking is that a significant cost center in today's IT department, hardware and licensing procurement and support, can be effectively outsourced to one's own employees. They will be, after all, accessing all the important business applications through generic and secure portals; the hardware shouldn't matter and can be left to personal preference (and expense!).

But is this really a practical approach for most CIOs? Or is it applicable only in certain specialized environments, and not a general bromide for all enterprises?

Nick Carr seems to cautiously support the latter moving toward the former over time; although he identifies the type of company providing the distinction, rather than the type of employee, which I think is probably more crucial. And Dave Berlind chimes in with some good supporting arguments from the CIO perspective but avoids the support issue entirely-presupposing either brilliant users, or, one imagines, an iron will on the part of the corporation to refuse to be dragged into answering individual issues unique to a single user's hardware.

Personally, while I am inclined to favor the trends that seem to be supporting this concept, I believe that they are long way from being complete, and I also believe that there are a great many factors that militate against such a move in most organizations. I realize that this is probably the stock CIO response, a defensive reaction at the thought of losing such a key component of most departments, and of losing control over the basic unit of corporate computing, but I think it is valid nonetheless.

It is hardly a foregone conclusion for many in the industry that web-based applications and virtualization are the ultimate answers to the basic issues in enterprise IT. Microsoft, for one, isn't buying it completely and think what you will they remain a force to be reckoned with in corporate computing. And just based on the examples presented in the CW article, it's not quite so simple as it seems. At Oliver Wyman Delta Organization & Leadership, CIO Bill Leo has already started down this path, but has had to lay down strict requirements for acceptable operating system, anti-virus, and patching levels for client machines, and to enforce those with corporate software. At Vedder, Price, Kaufman & Kammholz, CIO Maureen Durack says that while providing a stipend to individual attorneys for technology procurement purposes results in 15% savings over five years compared to procuring the technology in-house, her help desk has had to adapt to supporting a wider array of systems than previously and she has to work closely with many of the attorneys to assist them with procurement decisions. It's not clear if the costs associated with these additional burdens is factored into the savings listed or not; it's pretty clear to me, from personal experience, that the support is going to either be less effective or cost more to provide.

If you have to go as far as Leo did to enforce compliance with your standards, you begin to get a glimpse of why PC procurement and support moved in to the enterprise in the first place-it becomes exponentially difficult to support such diversity when you are going to demand any sort of standard from it. The massive moves toward corporate standardization and consolidation of procurement and support resources in the late nineties and early part of this century weren't simply done for fun-they were done because supporting myriad systems was a tremendous cost burden. And many organizations saw real savings from those standardization efforts.

Now, if you accept that web applications and terminal services can obviate the requirements for standardized hardware, then it seems to me that to realize the benefits you have to go all the way, and simply not attempt to dictate requirements or provide support outside the limits of the software services you are providing. To do otherwise opens up the same Pandora's box of issues that drove the original standardization efforts. The CW article, to its credit, digs into this issue, but disappointingly falls into the same trap that so many recent "entice the user" articles have in assuming that the wants and desires of Generation Whatever must be catered to in any business strategy to ensure success. I have yet to hear a reasonable argument as to what makes these kids so special that their whims should be catered to without any corresponding accountability. And as yet I haven't seen that they are any more capable than their predecessors of handling the technical pitfalls of selecting and managing their own machines for corporate use.

I love the concept of simply offering services and giving staff the flexibility to attach to those services however they like-I think that's probably going to be the most useful role technology will be able to play in the short-term in most businesses, at least after they figure out their process automation sufficiently to keep that from dragging them backward. This presumes, however, staff that are sufficiently able to manage their end of the arrangement, and if you don't have that, then you aren't truly offering flexibility, but simply more ways to frustrate people than ever before. And if you choose to staff your support operation to help users through these hurdles, then I think it's likely you're going to be spending more than you were when you simply had standards and procurement in-house. No doubt there is a productivity benefit to come from the flexibility; but whether it will off-set those support requirements is another question. My guess at the answer would be, "no."

Given truly stand-alone web applications or entirely safe virtual or terminal environments, I think this is a great option. In today's environment that is putting the cart very much before the horse-you can throw all the same arguments that one hears from CIOs arguing against entirely terminal environments or against cheap Linux desktops against this issue and find them equally valid. If those problems have not been solved, after a decade or more of trying, then this is not the new answer to computing efficiency and end-user happiness either.