[R] How do I get my IT department to "bless" R?

[Carl Witthoft]

It's just not that easy.  A friend of mine at a large company whose name 
  rhymes with  "Maytheon"  spent over 3 months trying to get approval 
from IT for a commercial database tool.   IT departments tend to be 
empire-building fools, and extraordinarily paranoid to boot.
At my parent company, whose name looks something like  "Gorthrup 
Numman,"  they have an entire IT Division whose goal in life seems to be 
to make computer life hell for everyone else.  When they say 
"Office2007" that's what every NGC employee gets no matter what.
Anyone who has the temerity to run updates (even OS or Office) downloads 
on their own risks the threat of termination. I'm not kidding.


So, this is rather OT for an R discussion group, but I wanted to add 
credence to the others who've been posting horror stories about the 
rules inside corporations.


I have to say I can't figure out how the IT dept's havent' noticed that 
lots of these same employees WRITE software, and could easily do far 
more damage (intentional or not) to the network than a few updates or 
open-source packages ever could

Carl

<quote>
----------------
Neil Shephard <nshephard_at_gmail.com>


What alternative do they expect you to use?

If they expect you to use Excel for statistics then its worth letting 
them know that this would be a very bad idea as there are many 
short-comings, some of which I've referenced at..

http://slack.ser.man.ac.uk/progs/stata/avoid_excel.html