Keep equipment records
September 22, 2008
I’ve recently heard of an issue at a friend’s place of work that made me think about equipment security policies, and I reviewed the procedure for equipment security at my organisation as a result of this.
When an employee is given equipment such as a laptop, mobile phone or blackberry, a form would normally be completed to indicate what equipment was issued, with serial numbers so that the individual machine could be identified. What had happened at my friend’s company was an employee had ‘lost’ the mobile phone charger that came with their phone, but then claimed that they had never been given one in the first place – they said they had been charging their phone with the charger from their personal phone as it was the same make. My friend was sure he’d issued a charger with the phone, but because he hadn’t kept a record of this as well as noting the phone’s serial number, he had no way of proving that the employee wasn’t telling the truth.
It sounds simple enough, but it seems that it’s quite easy to make a small oversight in the process of issuing equipment to employees, so the best thing to do is to create a form which will prompt you to note down everything that could be included when issuing a particular piece of equipment. This could include things like a spare laptop battery, chargers for the various pieces of equipment, a mouse/keyboard, or it could even include a USB stick or extra hard drive.
Fortunately, when I checked with the systems and security manager in my organisation, he always takes a record of every piece of equipment issued to staff, including the various add-ons. He also asks the employee to sign the form to agree that this is what is issued, and will ask them to sign again, with his counter-signature, when the equipment is returned or changed.
If you are responsible for company equipment, perhaps you should double-check your procedures to ensure that they are water-tight, to avoid any possible situation like the one my friend faced.
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