Well, I guess that just depends on how productive you expect me to be over the next quarter.
Like... you'll pay a developer $100 an hour, but then you ask them to spend an hour in a meeting to justify the purchase of a $50 widget that will save them an hour a day for the next year.
There must be some twisted logic at work, but I don't see it.
The question then becomes, is it a secretary/manager/ceo complaining about things 'not being fair' or is it simply that no one was ever asked and IT ended up making a decision on their own? Sometimes decisions left unspoken end up causing a kind of solidification by accident.
I find the biggest cause is that IT ends up being silo'd off (or being an MSP/corporate branch) so they aren't in touch with the workplace's culture and assume its one of petty ego.
Another factor can be that many of these decisions are looked through the eyes of the company's stock and that causes a sort of myopia regarding short-term costs vs long term gain.
Both of these end up being nasty feedback cycles and can be impossible to break once it becomes status quo.
They might need to categorize all expenses as capex vs opex, etc.
I am sure I would be way more effective without my managers. Prioritization would be somewhat different, but many of the day to day problems that hinder me being properly productive would have gone by now.
In reply to the top post, I would add the following task delayer : - supplier unreliability
We order a server from a major manufactoring company, which had a faulty PCI bus (well hardware defaults happen). They took 6 months and 5 differents motherboards to ship us the same exact configuration we initially payed for !