Oh absolutely true, you don't want to look completely clueless in front of people who take your money to setup an infrastructure ;)
>and make hard requirements to IT, that would help
That would make stuff so much more easy. Often it even lacks even a inventory of used applications/hardware....network.
Just one example:
Made a plan for new hardware and network (new cabling etc), then i walked around the workshop and there was that dusty machine running...i asked what it is...a dos-machine with...wait...TOKENRING. That machine was an integral part of the whole workshop ;) However we made a virtual FreeDOS machine and buy'd a software converter for the machine protocol, the 25yo cnc-machine needed a new card (ethernet instead of token-ring, very lucky we found that thing) so there was that one little DOS-machine no one though about who could stop the whole "modernization".
