Is IT The Enemy of Software Development?

I'm serious about this question. I'm dealing with a project that is for a "business unit" (they pay the bills) but the team has to "fit into" the IT department (the team physically sits in IT). Almost every interaction with the IT department has been a unmitigated disaster.

Here's how the things work: Our team decides we want something (for example, a new ESX development server running Windows Server 2008 so we can test in that environment). We schedule a meeting with IT. They say "absolutely not!" We have another team meeting to try and come up with plan that allows us to get what we want without IT. We come up with a kludgy plan to get what we want as well as plan to not tell anyone.

The only good part of this is that it really has motivated the discussion of cloud computing so we can outsource our entire development environment. We can get TFS hosted as well as cheap Windows Server 2008/SQL hosting. We'd need to figure out some VPN issues, but it would be great to be able to keep track of the project from anywhere (right now there's no way to get into the corporate development environment from the outside). None of this would be cheap, but that's going to change.

Oh, you should have seen the IT folks when I wanted to connect my 64 bit Vista box to the domain.