Last year, towards the end of a tough day, I had a short discussion with one of my developers. I asked him to show me a particular document on his PC, and it took an age for him to open it up because he had mapped a network share on his private laptop that he brought to work, and his laptop had stopped responding.

My instant reaction was to say that this was an unacceptable loss of time and that I would think about no longer allowing people to bring their own equipment to work.

Later, I couldn't get rid of the feeling that the decision felt wrong. Once I'd taken some time to think it over, I came to the conclusion that it could make sense to encourage people to bring their own equipment to work. After all, if successful companies such as Microsoft and Citrix are adopting Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) policies, it had to be something worth examining.

The tech-savvy people I work with use their computer equipment for both work and leisure, at various locations and at various times. What makes more sense: to have many different computers in different places to do all of this, or just one set of equipment that can do it all?

Many IT chiefs have fundamental concerns with this idea, the biggest usually being security: people bringing their own hardware to work, infected with all kinds of viruses. But that's a non-problem. It's part of a bigger issue that all organisations need to resolve.

Nowadays, there are plenty of ways for something bad to get into your company network. Think of data sticks, CDs, downloads, Skype, Trojans on websites there's no means of completely shielding your network, at least not without seriously limiting people's productivity.

Other issues to address included cost (especially how much to give each employee to spend on equipment and the tax implications of that), maintenance and other general IT policies, such as ensuring users had software compatible with the company standard.

So what did I decide? I have two jobs - as head of IT of the atHome Group and as boss of my own internet start-up, VAlain - and I came to a different conclusion for each company.

At atHome, because of complex legal and tax issues - and the company's corporate policies - I decided not to go for it. The potential gains didn't outweigh the difficulties. However, we support employees bringing their own equipment to supplement the hardware we supply, as long as they sign our security and IT usage policy.

At VAlain, which currently has only around 10 employees, I can be a lot more flexible, so I've implemented a full-scale BYOC policy. There are some big tax disadvantages, but the increased motivation and productivity of the team easily cancels that out.

Alain Fontaine is head of IT at Luxembourg-based online property portal atHome International Group, a member of REA Group, and managing partner of web developers VAlain.

Do you agree? Have your say by commenting below. And for a contrasting point of view, see Part 2 of this debate by Jim Ginsburgh, former VP of enterprise architecture at BP.