We call those machines "tool boxes" (tool-1 in Savannah, tool-2 in Dallas, tool-3 in Seattle, tool-4 in Toronto). The Central IT manages the hardware, OS (Linux or Solaris, depending), the 'core' applications (Perl, Apache, MySQL and Postgres), and the attendant maintenance. All of our stuff is on /home/department-name, one for each group. These directories are backed up on the first and fifteenth of the month. Otherwise, we are on our own.

What each group runs on the tool box is up to them. There have been a lot of 'little apps' developed here. Some of them have proven very useful to other departments. Word spreads rapidly at the grass roots, and the Central IT Department has had to break-down and accept 'wide-spread use of User Developed Code' in lieu of the Program Justification Procedure documents.

Also, Central IT has a policy that all applications will be written in the Corporate Standard Language -- Java. When they build a solution for you, that's what you will get. No Exceptions.

Building a little Perl script that reads the line quality numbers from the department edge-router and creates a web-page showing the current circuit load along with quality-of-service metrics -- one Saturday afternoon.

Getting your code accepted nine months later as the Corporate Gold Standard for Line Monitoring -- $2,000 bonus.

Watching the Central IT Sr. Tech trying to translate the Perl into Java, and giving up because 90% of the code is in two statements: 'use CGI;' and 'use SNMP;' -- Priceless.