Often this is not an intentional action on any one actors part - its an institutional thing - I work for a major european telecoms vendor, and inside my company

Often this is not an intentional action on any one actors part - its an institutional thing - I work for a major european telecoms vendor, and inside my company almost no one has big picture visibility, projects are sliced up so many ways from sunday, that to get something that even resembled a big picture you need to talk to tons of people and maintain a large social network (the good ol' boys network). The natural reaction to this lack of visibility is to create process for everything, and major european telecoms company is a very process oriented company, everything has a process, and a document thereof (assuming you can find the document, remember the part about poor visibility) - they are also very very fond of one-size-fits-all solutions to problems, so everyone gets the same laptop build, no matter who your end customer is, or what your job is (from field engineers to accountants). The key to productivity is knowing when it's best to let the process, no matter how slow moving it is - bump and grind along at its own pace and become a self resolving problem, and when to directly (and openly) short circuit it, whereas other times you might want to call on the 'good ol' boys network' to solve a problem or get information. To defend this way of working - there is some logic to these systems, they provide stability and a largely autonomous system that (albeit slowly) will provide a resolution to most of the problems the business will run into - they fail worst when dealing with rapidly emergent problems, exigent circumstances, when expanding to a new line of business or any time you run into a problem that can't be grouped into a existing category. Even a process driven environment however has some ability to adapt, even if it does fall completely outside the system at first, and so long as you have a reasoned argument, people often won't tell you no either (even if they might sit on your request for a bit), so while I dislike the amount of red tape at times, I've also learned how to work thru it, and around it when absolutely needed.