We are a society where enterprises appear to care about their employees' home lives (at least - a cynic might unjustly say - to the extent that employees experience personal catastrophes that impact their work productivity and effectiveness). As people come to use more and more devices to do a mix of business and personal work, and as the dividing line between what belongs to which enterprises and what context gets fuzzier and fuzzier (whether we like it or not, we are moving toward what GE's former CEO Jack Welch described as "boundaryless" enterprises), how many of you are thinking about how to provide - at arm's length, of course - general advice to your employees on how to deal with their personal IT, particularly if they are using it for business purposes?

Security, privacy, encryption, authentication and protection from malware (including, but not limited to, keystroke capture software) are all high on the list of issues users should think about, whether they're using corporate-provided technology for corporate purposes or personal technology for personal purposes, or any mix of corporate and personal technology. When it comes to security, most users are as much at risk from losing their "stuff" (be it personal or corporate) as they are from the other Malthusian-like threats modern computer users face.

I like David Pogue's recent "New York Times" article on personal backup-to-Web technologies (log-in required). It's not complete, I'm sure. And it fails to examine - in excruciating detail - all the possible problems these technologies might create (for example, the local device drivers for these packages may conflict with custom drivers we've implemented for other purposes, and corporate legal officers may become concerned that corporate content, subject to e-discovery, might get "misplaced" onto the "X" drive). However, it also provides some reasonable advice for users to do personal backups.

Do you provide guidance (or simple guidelines) for your users on how they can protect their personal IT health (on non-corporate systems and for non-corporate information)? If so, do you create the content or turn to various Web sites for reasonable guidance? If the latter, then what sites do you frequently search for material for your users' general use (not limited to corporate issues)?

Have you ever known of personal IT health issues impacting your users' productivity?

Is this an issue you care about? If so, then let me know.

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>> The two views - MIS-centric vs. employee-enabling - need to converge....

The convergence is best achieved by letting MIS be enabling-centric. Security concerns and policy enforcement (management policy) are important considerations in MIS work. But a myopic focus on these and related issues must not loose sight of the core mission. IT must not behave like an automotive engineer who decides cars should not have wheels, forgetting that while motion entails risk, the mission is to enable motion.

If data loss, security breach, workflow deterioration, etc. are conceived as disabling events, then the "MIS-centric" perspective you describe can be subsumed within an enabling-centric core mission. To extend the metaphor, a car has both accelerator and brakes in order to enable the driver. The brakes are not there to disable the driver. The convergence is best achieved by focusing on the core mission: enabling people to pursue business objectives.