OSNews

You make it sound as if the IT department owns the company and is the sole reason for ones employment. As if they are some benevolent entity who are doing us the favour of letting us use their infrastructure.

The IT department is there to perform a service and they don't own the computers or network anymore than the janitors own the toilets. I'll let them tell me what software to run when I let the janitors tell me not to shave or brush my teeth in the washrooms.

If I may cite Simon Travaglia as the original BOFH: users cause a decrease in performance on network and servers, so the best working networks and servers are the ones without any users around them.

But seriously now; your analogy with the restrooms is not correct. It comes down to what is considered appropriate use of company resources, be they restrooms or computers. Generally, when it comes to computers, it has been proven that you get better results if you restrict the users from altering the environment on their work computer in significant ways.

Installing software carries a very high potential of damage to that environment. So any administrator worth his salt will forbid that and many other things. He is there to keep the workstations, servers and network in working condition at all times and it simply cannot be done if every user could alter what is supposed to be a homogenous system in unpredictable ways.

Some of the best working networks I've seen were those where the admins kept tight control over the users' workstations. Such as giving them access only to a home directory on a partition mounted with limiting flags such as noexec. No admin rights and definitely no way to alter the machine's environment significantly.

The company owns the computers and network and the IT department enforces any rules the company sees fit to implement. This means if the company has a policy of employees NOT installing unapproved software or modifying the base configuration in any way, it is IT's role to make sure you don't do that.