How do I get my IT department to "bless" R?

I currently use R at work "under the radar", but there's a chance I
could loose that access.  I'd like to get our company to feel
comfortable with open source and R in particular.  Does anyone have
any experience with their company's IT department and management that
they would be willing to share?  How does one get an all Microsoft
shop on board with allowing users to user R?  I know about the recent
NY Times article and recent news.  I'm afraid I may need some case
studies or examples of what other companies have done.

In many cases your IT department will feel secure with R if there's a
company behind it to offer technical support and offer a "throat to
choke" if problems arise.  (Whether it's the former or the latter that
is more significant depends on the company.)  There are some companies
out there that offer support subscriptions to R, including the one I
work for.

If you work in a regulated environment (such as clinical pharma with
21CFR11, or finance with Sarbanes-Oxley), there may also be some
nervousness about whether R can be compliant.  It almost certainly is,
but it often needs to be validated in your own environment. I wrote
about this recently (from the perspective of FDA validation) at
http://blog.revolution-computing.com/2009/01/analyzing-clinical-trial-data-with-r.html
.

In many companies IT departments are getting comfortable with relying
on FOSS applications, but the real successes (Linux, Apache, MySQL,
...) have come when there's a commercial company to back up the open
source community.

# David Smith

--
David M Smith <david at revolution-computing.com>
Director of Community, REvolution Computing www.revolution-computing.com
Tel: +1 (206) 577-4778 x3203 (Seattle, USA)