Does your School give you the rights to download software on your machine?

Hey everyone-taking a poll here. We currently have some teachers that have admin rights to their machine and can download software, and some that do not. One of our concerns is the time it is taking our IT department to weed through the software requests as we currently package all the software that our teachers might use...for example Smartboard or CPS software. Because we are so understaffed, our packaging is way behind and we are not able to push out the latest versions of some of this software until several months after it is released. This is a bummer when bugs are fixed or we call about a problem and they tell us to upgrade the software.

I'm wondering what other districts are doing on this front...are you allowed to download your own software? If not, do you get a timely response when you log a request? Would also be interested in those who work on the IT side if you have a good process you could recommend.

We want to keep people's machines safe from malware but give people freedom to incorporate the newest apps that they want as well...it is a fine line between the two!

Thanks in advance-