IT Flexibility

Bob Lewis asks how if it is practical for IT to provide Virtual Machines as sandboxes for users to experiment with.

On the core question, it may have to do with your user base. If you run a business with technically inclined staff, it would probably work very well. If, on the other hand, you are in a more typical company where one or two people per department are savy enough to set up that access database, the people who might leverage that access database would probably be challenged by dealing with a whole seperate operating system on top of their current machine.

You also have some serious security considerations - and what do you do if that access database needs to touch some data too sensitive to expose to the sandbox?

The bottom line is there is no good substitute for good IT leadership, where part of IT's mandate is to provide tools for users to inovate and improve the operations of the company through technology.