"Clearly, situations where security, regulatory requirements, and high availability are necessities, self-provisioned tools aren't a fit," says Matt Brown, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

As one might imagine, the concept has detractors who point to additional practical matters.

"In the long run, I suspect it would cost more and cause more problems than it solves. Notably, interoperability issues with network, printers, software, documents, viruses, and corporate intellectual property remaining on personal computers," says John Quillen, CTO of YouChoose.net, a campaign-promotion site.

A creeping force IT can't ignore
Yet Quillen is practicing the user-managed PC scheme himself. "Ironically, I'm in a startup using my own [Apple] MacBook Pro while the rest of management uses Windows." And Forrester's Brown said that he has anecdotally found an increasing number of executives doing the same as Quillen and carrying non-company-standard computers, namely Apple notebooks, and asserting that the only corporate application they consistently use is e-mail.

More often than many people in IT care to admit, small factions of rebel users are supporting their own PCs, sanctioned or not. And the people now entering the workforce and those who will follow in their footsteps are already accustomed to supporting their own PCs, so the argument that users don't know enough to choose and manage their own PCs will be harder to make over time.

"The generation entering the workforce, namely the millennial generation, is much better equipped to evaluate, purchase, and manage the technology they use than previous generations," Brown said. "I am always amazed to see how quickly workers in this generation are able to assess, download, install, and get productive on the tools that are available on the Web."