IT has always been an enabler, in my mind, however in looking at the 'real world', post MBA/MSIT, I get to see what professors warned us about. Some wise souls told us that IT should be an enabler for the firm, and not a gatekeeper. However, as we see in this Slate article, IT has assumed the role of the gatekeeper instead of sticking to that of the enabler.

I've decided to pull a few quotes of interest and comment on them.

One obvious problem with such restrictions is that they're arbitrary. In blocking "dangerous" sites or programs, IT managers inevitably restrict many more useful applications. One editor at a large New York publishing house told me that the art department at his company is constantly running into the firm's net-nanny filtering program. An artist will need to look up, say, pictures of 14th-century Ottoman swords in order to illustrate a fantasy novel—and she'll run into a notice saying, "Access to that site has been blocked because of the following category: Weapons."

I agree. In almost any field there is a need to do research, and the biggest medium for research is the internet these days. The research may be either for image research, as with the example, or how to perform a certain function in Excel given certain parameters. Hitting F1 does not always provide the help you need and the internet can provide a wealth of information to help you solve your problem.

What's worse, because they aren't tasked with understanding how people in different parts of a company do their jobs, IT managers often can't appreciate how profoundly certain tools can improve how we work

This is one thing that I wish more IT folk did, and I saw as a flaw in a related area - computer science. Back when I was an undergrad I hard stories of people hiring some of my fellow classmate to build a database for them and in the end the database wasn't really working the way the client wanted. The back end may have been beautiful however usability wise my fellow classmates didn't bother to properly interview the customers to understand their needs and keep them in the loop in the development process. I think that this is what's been happening to IT - they don't understand the needs to their constituents and they thus become gatekeepers instead of enablers.

You might argue that firms need to make sure that people stay on task—if employees were allowed to do whatever they wanted at work, nobody would get anything done. But in many instances, that claim is ridiculous. My fiancée works at a hospital that blocks all instant-messaging programs. Now, she and her co-workers are doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals—they've been through years of training in which they've proved that they can stay on task even despite the allure of online chat. Can anyone seriously argue that the hospital would suddenly grind to a halt if they were allowed to use IM at work?

I would say (and my professors would probably agree) that this is a call for management rather than IT. Management can decide what is and isn't a distraction, but of course in large, centralized, organizations this becomes a problem as upper management isn't always in tune with front line employees and management doesn't always understand organizational behavior - a must (IMHO) if you are to tackle this (perhaps perceived) issue of goofing off, you need to understand organizational behavior, instead of being the person with the stopwatch.

"results-only workplace environments," where people are judged on what they produce, not how

As an acquaintance of mine called this: "a grown up job". Results are what matter, not how you achieve them, or how slow or fast you achieve them (so long as you aren't doing anything illegal of course!)

User X: "I can't make the letters bigger. I need them bigger."
IT: "You mean make the font larger?"
User X: "Yeah, sure, I guess. How do I do that?"
IT: "What program are you using?"
User X: "FreewareText7000."
IT: "I'm not familiar with that. I can't help you."
User X: "Don't you guys fix these computey machines?"
IT: "Yes, we do, but we don't support that program."
User X: "Well, Tina in Finance uses it and her letters are bigger."

This comment came from someone in an IT department. I can sympathize with this because there are many people who will load some sort of Lolz canihazcheezburger type of program and them not know what to do, in which case they call (and possibly harass) the IT department. Of course this is a policy issue that is solved not at the IT department level, but rather at the policy level. If you do unchain people's computers and they can install whatever, do they also implicitly accept that that can ONLY call IT for the standard programs installed on their computer? or do they have carte blanche to call for whatever program they want?