Where is the line of doing things for convenience and doing things for protection of the company?

I have users that are spoiled and whine like teenagers in a long car ride without a DVD player or their iPods. They think they are entitled to anything they want and fail to fully justify things. Its “Just because we need it.” No “It will provide me to quickly do my job hence being able to provide faster service or coding for our product.”

My upper management is annoyed with this. They haven’t exactly given me the power to tell the users too bad or to be able to send it back to the users to say need further justification, but they state they are not happy about the users here.

I believe that an employee is here to do a job. They need to state what they need to do their job and if the management doesn’t give it, they need to work around it by either taking longer to do the job or find other options that can get the job done.

I also believe IT’s responsibility is to provide a service to the company, by providing a service that is laid out by the management/owners along with doing what is needed to protect the company in the field of IT. Where we can provide service that enables the employees/company to do things faster or better, and its approved by the management, we should do it.

Now when a employee needs to have something fixed they need to have the expectation that it will take a while to get it fixed. Instead my users try to dictate the time they can give up their machine, with no thought to the fact that the solution will take longer and may make the system unusable in the middle of the repair. Entitled or Just dedicated to their job?

In the end its all up to the Companies Management to approve of things. Its up to IT to set the companies expectations in the scope of what the management has stated they want from IT, of what is able and what isn’t. Unfortunately its IT that is blamed by the employees for them not being able to do things. We are the faces of many of these IT decisions and will get blamed for it.

Sometimes the Messenger gets it in the back by upset employees.

Update: I complained in a IRC channel and was told to shut up. I’m whinnying like the users I loath and they pay for my salary.  Good Point.