Through the forcefield of a VP two levels above your boss who authorised it? Even if you know about it - which is a big "if" - you probably won't have either th

Through the forcefield of a VP two levels above your boss who authorised it? Even if you know about it - which is a big "if" - you probably won't have either the authority or the practical means to shut it down. It's become a classic problem. Organisations want to centralise infrastructure and services because consolidation saves on costs and increases visibility and control. Particularly if you're under specific regulations that can make things much easier. But that only happens if the centralised provision actually works. It has to be adequately resourced and reasonably well managed and supportive of the people using the infrastructure or services it provides. If the centralised provision is not good then it had one job and failed to do it. Whose fault it is doesn't really matter. It's not supporting the other parts of the organisation to do their jobs and inevitably a point will come where that infra gets "othered". We've been seeing this phenomenon ever since we had central system administrators who could lock down the OS on individual employees' workstations. The admins argue that they need to make sure security updates are properly deployed and they need to prevent non-expert users from breaking things and they need to ensure consistency because they're also running the help desk and ultimately they're responsible for these things so they need the authority to control them. All very fair and reasonable. And all completely irrelevant to someone with actual revenue-generating work to do who is being blocked for days or weeks because some sysadmin whose opinions are not necessarily justified by their effectiveness hasn't enabled or authorised some essential facility.