Do you ever feel like you’re in IT prison? I’m lucky to work for a small company, where I am free (pretty much) to buy and use whatever hardware and software I like. If there’s something new I want to try, I download it and use it; aside from having to connect to our company email server and use our file sync software, there are no specific requirements placed on what I do.

I’m basically in IT bliss. No procurement restrictions. No blocked websites. No nagging IT department. But, I’m sorry to say, I’m very much in the minority among my peers who work for larger organisations. Even the mid-size ones like to issue new recruits with standard ‘locked down’ (why does that phrase make me shudder?) laptops and block Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday morning about ‘Why Businesses Banish Cool Technologies’ — and my instinctive reaction was to answer ‘because they’re not cool’. It tells a tale of a company which blocks pretty much everything:

[Regulatory requirements mean] banning Skype, the popular online phone service that has instant-messaging software built in, even though many researchers say their clients like to communicate with them through Skype.

Web email is off limits because it’s impossible for the company to monitor what employees say in those messages. People can’t load files onto CDs, USB drives or other devices because there’s no way to control what they do with the data once it’s there.

Of course, a clever commenter pointed out that software from the likes of OnState allows complete logging of Skype calls and chats. Webmail’s trickier, admittedly — and I’m not an expert on the regulatory requirements imposed on financial institutions in the States, though I suspect they’re pretty hideous and distinctly un-cool.

Given all of this beating-technology-back-to-1994, I was really excited by a piece in Technology Guardian yesterday, with the news that BP and Unisys — both megaliths in their own right — are taking a much more enlightened approach to the dreaded corporate IT policy.

BP’s trialling a scheme where employees can opt-out of the standard corporate IT provision, and instead get an annual allowance to acquire their own hardware and software. There are a few restrictions, of course, much like my own situation: employees have to be able to connect to BP’s email and file servers, and respect their security policy, but those don’t seem like unreasonable requirements. The only proviso is this — having opted out of corporate IT, they also opt out of corporate IT support — a move described by Ian Julien, infrastructure and operations manager (and it’s not clear whether this is form the employee or employer perspective) as ‘bloody marvellous’.

It’s not clear whether there are restrictions on purchasing — is there a mandated supplier or lessor, for example? And, of course, the piece makes no mention about internet use; are social networking or shopping websites blocked when using corporate internet connections, for example? Is Skype blocked?

Nevertheless, this seems like a bold move. Of course, the motivation was primarily financial — the desire to shift things off the corporate balance sheet — but Ian Julien says that it’s pretty popular with employees too. I bet they’re seeing more MacBooks around the place for a start.

The broader problem, I suspect, is a product of fear and complacency — yes, there are industries in which regulatory requirements make things more difficult than they might be otherwise. I’m not about to suggest that we allow people at the SIS to send CDs through the post — but then they’re probably smart enough not to do that in the first place. It’s mid-size, unregulated organisations which, in a way, frustrate me most — particularly those with largely professional staff.

If you’re a management consultancy firm, for example, with a few hundred employees, don’t you trust them to make the best use of their time, and not spend all day on eBay? Don’t you trust them not to share client files with their mates down the pub or your competitors? Don’t you think that allowing them more freedom to choose software and hardware would increase their productivity? I’ve written before about how IM in the workplace can be a benefit rather than a hindrance to productivity, for example. But it’s a fear that employees might do something naughty — and a lack of trust in their dedication to suspect that they might — which keeps all of those computers firmly ‘locked down’.

Which is a shame, really — we’re living in a generation of IT innovators, who aren’t necessarily the people creating companies like Skype. I’m thinking about the small-scale innovators. They’re sitting in offices, thinking that it’d be much easier and save thousands of pounds if they could — oh no, wait, they can’t. They can’t install that.