During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act - George Orwell
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Australian firm starts "bring your computer to work" initiative
AUSTRALIAN BANK Suncorp has asked its employees to start bringing their computers to work, an initiative which could save the company a fortune.
The firm claims that its move is more about the worker's experience than about saving money, which we kind of doubt. It says that employees want to use the same technology at work and at home and that allowing them to bring their computers to work will encourage them to perform better.
Luckily for staff the computers expected are laptops and smartphones, not desktop PCs, which might be a little difficult to bring into work, especially if someone is using public transport or walking.
There are potential flaws with this approach, however, as it could be significantly less secure than a dedicated work computer network, not to mention the potential for employees to play games that they might have installed at home.
Suncorp hopes to get around this by using Citrix and a range of open source software for creating a staff-only environment that only allows company-approved applications, according to Reuters. Let's hope they turn that feature off when the employees go home.
Nvidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, predicted that the future would involve bringing your own computer to work. He said it would be just like taking your own car. His comments came earlier this month, but who would have thought that this future would come so soon?
The initiative will begin in August. µ
Tags: Hardware
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due to the ridiculously small amounts of cash being spent on education, and it is being cut again, in the USofA, a lot of teachers there use their own PCs, laptops and desktops, as the machines provided by the schools are invariably too old to run anything approaching usable software.
Thank you for the heads-up. Suncorp is a name I will avoid like the plague in the future.
I prefer my bank secure, with hardware, software and network attended to by professionals, and no Facebook or MS Live accounts to leak confidential information from.
Absolutely ridulous.
From every angle this is wrong:
Loss of security for the bank.
Loss of security and privacy for the employees.
Heightened risk of being mugged carrying a laptop for the employee.
Increased risk to employees' property being damaged in transit/by the bank network.
The Nvidia CEO's assumption is that everyone travels to work in their car.
I work in central London. Nobody in my office travels to work by car, so that analogy doesn't work. And the thought of having to lug a laptop back and forth every day in rush hour is too horrendous to contemplate!
It was very common in australian job adds about 5-6 years ago? to see "bring your own laptop" in job adds, so this isn't new, but its certainly odd for a bank to do this.
Feel sorry for the poor IT staff that have to support every ridiculous hardware+software combination on the planet though.
Maybe Nvidia CEO is way wrong in comparing PCs with cars... If you need a car to do your job (as is the case with the PC in the bank) you are going to use a company car, not your own. Or you are going to ask refunds for fuel etc. So mr. Nvidia is a moron.
No one is factoring in the hassle and cost of securing all these "personal" notebooks from a company point of view, AND I won't allow the company to put their hands on my personal PC anyways
So "Cashier Number Four Please" becomes "Player One Ready"?
Okay, maybe it's not that kind of bank, or it's back-office workers. Look...... if there's a wireless network, they can take their computer to work in their car, and then not get out of it. Just sit in the car park and compute.
With some more technology, they can get into their car at home with their computer, and just work there.
Or, maybe the car itself has enough computing capacity to do a day's work.