Ha! If you have a userbase of thousands of PCs, or PCs & Macs, or PCs, Macs & mobile devices, you absolutely have to have a standard operating environment, for

Ha! If you have a userbase of thousands of PCs, or PCs & Macs, or PCs, Macs & mobile devices, you absolutely have to have a standard operating environment, for many reasons, and if you believe otherwise you have no business commenting in this thread. You don't need to use something like Tivoli, but you do need a standard desktop image, standardized software packages and a method to provision/deprovision machines, management/reporting software, some kind of license management scheme (to prevent over-installation of commercial software, especially stuff that uses a corporate license key rather than individual keys), anti-virus and security systems, a way to force full disk encryption, a method of dealing with Patch Tuesdays, a way to push standard browser configurations or proxy .pac files, and innumerable other things. Believe it or not, most employees' job at most companies has nothing to do with computing. They use computers to execute some other responsibilities, but the computer is a tool and all they want is for it to be as easy as possible to use, and for it to "just work". Even if you have a BYOD policy, you still need management around it for a lot of the reasons I listed.