We have dozens of "multi-user systems." Our support staff will administer them as far as adding/removing users, installing software, setting up mundane things (telnet, ftp, ssh), adhering to corporate policy on things like security, OS patches, etc.

Then we go and put whatever we want on them. Support staff supports/maintains the parts that they put on, and disclaims all support on the rest (e.g., VNC server on AIX). Works ok for us, but as we are not only are software developers ourselves but also require root access for our own jobs, we get away with a lot ;-)

Anyway, that's the term we use for this scenario. We also have corporate-supported webservers that are managed by another group. And they require some annoying levels of paperwork to get into, similar to your concern. I stay away from those. Instead, I use a linux box running Apache, I use CGI::Application and HTML::Template, and don't even have the support staff help with my server. I take backups and copy them via NFS to an AIX box which is properly backed up ;-)