This, indeed. I'm currently teaching in schools in the UK, and nearly all the IT departments I deal with are solely interested in IT for its own end. I've hea

This, indeed. I'm currently teaching in schools in the UK, and nearly all the IT departments I deal with are solely interested in IT for its own end. I've heard IT managers (at different schools) refer to it as "[my] network" or "[my] machines" - totally missing the point that they're all there for one reason, to facilitate learning. While this certainly isn't the case in all schools, the majority of the ones I've worked at have IT departments who really have no interest in or knowledge of what teachers really need/want to do, and simply put their own pre-decided processes and systems in place. When trying to get something changed, a brick wall of technobabble is presented to school management who generally don't know any better and defer to this 'higher power'. Unfortunately I know enough to have seen through many such reasons (such as "You can't have more than 10 Apple devices on a Wi-Fi network, it will crawl to a halt", and "Firefox? I'm not having that rubbish on my network - we're sticking with Internet Explorer"), but there's no way to convince anyone in management that they're being sold a dummy, particularly when it was they who decided to hire the IT manager in the first place. I've got a room of machines where it takes 5 minutes to run the software I use to teach (Cubase) because the machines have mandatory profiles enforced that have been taken before the plug-in scanning has been done, so it does this scan (5 minutes or so) every time you run it. Think of the learning time lost over the 5 years that's been in place. I really think a plan of getting these people out of their offices and into the workplace to shadow people who use what they maintain would make a world of difference. Instead of being some whiner who creates 'frivolous' support requests, they would see that a bad decision can drastically impact the experience of everyone who uses their tools. I think I say this as someone who has been on the other side of the fence; I do support for some IT installations (including a first school with 400 pupils), so I'm tech savvy enough to be able to do what's needed, but try to approach it from a function-first rather than ideological approach.