About a decade ago I started working in a company with about 30k employees (?) that had really stringent top-down mandates. You had to get a standard laptop, installed by our IT partner, with a 50Mb mail quota and all manner of seriously outdated MSFT tools. To add insult to injury, a fairly huge chunk of money would be charged to our budget per person for this. I'll get back to the cost issue.

I did something no middle manager had done before me. I said "no". And my boss backed me up on it.

I got called into meetings with people with long titles and yelled at. I was told that this was insubordination, unproductive behavior and whatnot. I calmly explained that this didn't change anything because the equipment, software and service levels were not of acceptable quality and especially not at the cost to our budget. The answer remained "no".

Note that I was willing to be fired over this. I'd rather not have a job there than have to accept having to work with tools that would have made my day miserable. I made this perfectly clear.

So our organization existed wholly outside the company's internal network. We leased a broadband connection, set up our own internal infrastructure behind a couple of firewalls, had qualified people configure the network infrastructure, set up mail, calendaring etc with a better service provider, set up collaboration tools internally etc.

The cost? In the first year it was about the same as we would have paid for laptops, network, services etc in the existing regimen. The reason was that everyone got to pick their own computers - which were on the order of 6-7 times more expensive than the standard company laptop. All of our services were cheaper and orders of magnitude better. The second year we didn't have to buy everyone new computers so we had money to pay our own IT staff. People who worked for us, in our offices who you could walk over to and talk to. Stuff got done.

(We still could have bought ourselves expensive laptops every 4 years and still spend less money than the standard IT setup in the company)

Several things happened over the next years. Some of the systems were better integrated with the mothership. Employees from the rest of the company started to "bum rides" off of us. That is, they got accounts on our IT infrastructure, got access to our network etc. Because it allowed them to work more efficiently. There were clashes over security policy etc. These were resolved through reviews and formal approvals. Some of these were unnecessarily tense. Mostly because they laid bare the fact that the people who got upset about "the rebels" tended to be poorly qualified and had a habit of being bullies.

Eventually the culture slid backwards as good leaders left the company and were replaced with people who didn't actually know how to build an effective culture. A lot of the "freeloaders" were kicked out, which I felt was unnecessary and shortsighted. (In my book this was just basic poor judgement: if you can improve collaboration by spending a few hundred dollars per year per person, that should be a trivial decision. You just do it).

In parallel with this there was the production side. Rather than spending 6-9 months asking for virtual machines operated by incompetent consultants only available through a ticket system(), and with tons of paperwork to get anything done, we made use of AWS. A decade ago most of the IT leadership of the company had no idea what AWS was. It was obvious we wouldn't ask them for anything because they weren't qualified to help.

We got started by ignoring two families of rules. IT procurement and how to pay for stuff. We used a credit card to buy AWS resources, which our boss then expensed. This meant that we were up and running 1-2 hours after making the decision. No twiddling thumbs for half a year while people have to go to meetings and write documents of exactly what we need, and pay a fortune for third rate service on obsolete hardware.

This too went through a maturation process. I'm sure someone went through the formal procurement procedures (I wasn't involved in that). AWS started billing us via invoice. Since we are in Europe we also needed a few formal agreements on proper data handling by AWS etc. All of that happened.

A few years later we were the biggest AWS customer in our region. The funny thing is that when I spoke to the Group CEO about this, he had no idea that it started as an act of insubordination and that we really hadn't given the IT organizations any choice. Because there is always someone ready to take credit for other people's results.

I'm not saying that people should put their career on the line to do what we did. Because you kind of have to take that risk. But what I am saying is that unproductive top down mandates can be pushed back if you have people with some backbone. Even in companies where obedience is a big thing.

() I'm sure lots of IT services companies do this, but the company that delivered IT services to my former employer had a policy of closing tickets as soon as they could. Even when issues were not resolved. They could then misrepresent these cases as "closed". I don't think anyone really called them out on this practice. This meant that any non-trivial problem had to be filed again and again and again.