Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Shamed", come on. You don't ask the guy in charge of maintenance to validate new tools. That person's job revolves around stability, and they will always make the safest possible call. If a new tool is needed, a steering committee of some kind should be used, and IT will be one part of that.
Where I work, IT in general has little say about what tool I use on my PC. They do periodic scans to check that I don't have any known unsafe tools, or tools that are known not to be OK without a formal license. But otherwise, as long as I'm not violating a license and not circumventing my virus scanner, I can use whatever tool I want. Work would come to a crawl if IT had to validate every single tool used in our com…
If so, then they're completely right to stop some novice programmer from bringing their scripts to bear. There's no reason to take that risk if they have the funding for the current human solution. Bring it up to the superiors and pitch it, talk to some devs. I've seen groups lose hundreds of millions of dollars when one of these excel vbscript python enthusiast AHK things go off the rails. It's a mess, and - again - risk aversion is the most reasonable stance from a business standpoint. He's not a hacker founder, he's a business IT manager.
Edit to say, it sounds like you work at a company with <500 engineers, maybe even <500 employees total. That's fine! It's good even, but it's not an experience that's easily exported to the realm of Actual Business, at least not exactly. As a consultant, I've had billion dollar companies that need the fast fix (python script with a csv datastore to keep some account info or whatever) and I've worked for companies where this sort of approach would get you insta-canned. They're both right enough, but assuming one size fits all is absolutely crazy. It sounds like the mega oil corp above was the latter, at least to me.