Increasing personal productivity has been a goal of the IT industry since the first PCs appeared.

The idea of empowering users to do more in a day has resulted in the development of increasingly complex office suites and personal information managers.

Indeed, the requirement is so strong that it has created a whole market for small devices, such as PDAs and smartphones.

But after all the software has been implemented, the phones purchased and docking cradles installed, one question remains: do these things really make you more productive?

Of all the experts Computing asked, not one was willing to try to establish a return on investment (ROI) analysis for PDAs and smartphones.

"I might as well try to find the ROI of my desk, which cost a lot more than my PDA," said Neil Laver, Windows product marketing manager at Microsoft.

But the idea that personal devices increase your productivity simply by being there is essentially flawed. One issue is choosing the right device for the right employee.

John Lidbetter, IT strategy manager at recruitment company Reed Personnel Services, suggested that PDAs have not yielded the hoped for advantages.

"There is a limited benefit, to be honest," he said of the Palm systems he has tried in the past. After the initial excitement has worn off a lot of the devices will be "left in the bottom drawer".

Lidbetter commented of the Palm: "I wasn't using it to a great extent. It was useful as a calendar, but to come back into the office and synchronise it was a bit of a task in itself."

He has instead renounced the Palm in favour of Research In Motion's BlackBerry device, an email and calendar-enabled mobile phone, which he is now trialling with senior management.

The BlackBerry uses an always-on GPRS connection to download appointments and email data from the office.

Reed did not have a corporate strategy for the use of PDAs among its employees, although it did operate a discount scheme.

Analysts suggest that to really make personal productivity devices work, they have to be adopted at an institutional level.

Max Nathan is senior researcher for the Work Foundation, a management consultancy and work issues lobbying group which recently completed a joint study with Microsoft on the future of work.

He breaks down corporate users of productivity tools into two types of companies: those that buy personal tools for employees and leave them to get on with it; and those that complement such purchases with training initiatives. The latter stand a better chance of success, according to Nathan.

Many users of PC-based productivity tools, such as Microsoft Office, could stand some more training. Just ask the person sitting next to you how to use the change tracking features in Word, or how to create a currency converter formula in Excel, and see what they say.

But Nathan maintained that the commercial uptake of qualifications designed to enhance the use of personal productivity applications is minimal.

Just one per cent of the UK workforce has passed the European Computer Driving Licence, a qualification administered in the UK by the British Computer Society.

Similarly, none of the companies Nathan spoke to for his research had taken advantage of government initiatives for small businesses intended to increase employees' IT skills.

According to a report published in September by the Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society, only 3,000 young people were involved in technology apprenticeships with UK companies, compared with 60,000 in Germany.

Without such training, we are destined to become a nation of techno-Luddites when it comes to using personal productivity software.

But while training may be necessary for PC-based productivity tools, you could imagine that it is not an issue for PDAs, which are designed to be easy to use.

Not so fast, warned Michael Mace, chief technology officer at PalmSource, which licenses the Palm operating system to other device makers. But he is refreshingly realistic about other problems in deploying PDAs in corporate environments.

One mistake that IT managers make is to restrict the use of PDAs to corporate applications. PDAs and smartphones are emotive items - electronic jewellery - and employees will use them for personal data alongside their workplace data. If you try to prevent that, they will rebel and begin connecting their own devices to their PCs.

Unless your company has a proactive policy for equipping employees with PDAs, you may find them connecting devices without permission anyway, leading to the bottom-up, organic growth of devices connected to your network.

This creates a security risk in both directions, as employees connect unknown devices into your infrastructure, download company information onto it, and then take it off-site.

Persuading users to activate their PDA passwords is one remedy to the security problem. Another is to use PDA security software from companies such as Credant or Notify Technology, some of which also offer managed server synchronisation facilities.

Many employees simply synchronise PDAs with their local PCs, but hooking into a back-end server to retrieve data for a personal productivity device is vital if companies are to get the most value out of their devices.

So says Charlie Grantham, an executive producer at The Future Of Work, a US-based membership organisation that helps companies increase staff productivity.

He argues that collaborative systems such as groupware can revitalise PDA and smartphone devices by hooking them into corporate resources and making them more valuable to employees.

"If you depend on individuals to synchronise their files, it won't happen," said Grantham.

Lidbetter stressed that this is a key benefit of the BlackBerry, because its always-on connection helps his senior managers keep abreast of changing appointments updated by their administrative assistants as they move from meeting to meeting.

It is difficult to quantify the ROI of personal productivity tools, first because they are so diverse, and second because their uses differ between roles and companies.

But what we do know is that integrating the tools properly into your corporate information structure, while protecting your network with the right security tools, will give them the potential to be personal productivity tools as opposed to status symbols. Corporate jewellery is fun, but expensive.