Not necessarily about knowledge - it's about willingness to do something.
I do not profess to know more than IT professionals about IT, but I do know more about what we do and what our needs are. Every business need our team has had, I have raised with IT, who in each case have said they are not willing to do anything and we just have to manage things as they are. I should point out that the IT team are more willing than the service provider - the service provider (their contract runs out next year) - throw as many hurdles as they can and will charge over the odds for the smallest change, because they know their contact is ending and we (that is the whole organisation, not just my team) is not happy with them. To use one example, email archiving: Managing EU funds requires all emails to be kept up to 2025. IT's solution, we should save each individual email by dragging it from Outlook to a folder on the shared drive. My solution, to write VBA code that saves the email message with a meaningful filename (date, time, inbox/sent, sender, conversation topic) and writes a record to a database (with a link to the saved file) to enable easy searching. The IT team are actually considering rolling out my solution wider to address issues where other users have a need to archive emails. For the record, I always thoroughly comment my code before rolling it out any wider than my own personal use.
I concede there are some valid reasons to have things locked down but every place I have worked before this, they have coped with less locking down than this. I am a laptop user, due to frequent travel, but the only way I can take a database with me to work on while on the train is by copying it to a memory stick as databases are excluded from the sync of my personal area, and I can't copy it anywhere else. I do otherwise only use network drives (even at home, I use network drives all the time rather than the c drive). Also, we are not able to follow shortcuts from within applications - we have to navigate through all the folder structures simply to save a file.
The point I am trying to make is that while in a perfect world, IT would work constructively with users to meet business needs in the best way possible, not all IT professionals have the same level of professionalism or bureaucracy gone mad just prevents anything getting done. When my bosses demand something, and I can't get anywhere from talking to IT, I still have to do something.
