The cellphone, the PDA, the laptop. Yours, or your employees'? Managed and controlled by you or left to the discretion of someone who may let his three-year-old run riot with a device that contains sensitive corporate data. Security risk? Definitely. Ban it outright? Definitely not. Manage it? Now there's the trick.

"Many knowledge workers," says Gartner in a report entitled The Impact of Personal Infrastructure on the Enterprise*, "will increasingly access enterprise systems through an extensive 'personal infrastructure'. Enterprise IT departments must learn to accommodate this and adjust their policies accordingly." This is something that all IT departments are aware of. How to manage the monster, however, is not as well established.