At the same time, it's entirely reasonable to have certain expectations of your people. The workplace keeps getting more democratic, but people in a democracy still have certain responsibilities. Here's a relatively minor example. Our stock-quote module allows users to choose the stocks that they want to track. Here's a more significant example, one that comes up often.
Companies care a lot about their brands.
And, when it comes to branding, we know that design matters and that projecting a corporate brand within a company is no less important than projecting it through external marketing materials. Yes, that information must be displayed in three columns. Ultimately, the user has to win. People have to be able to get the resources that they need to do their jobs. One beef about intranets is that they take so long to deploy.