The IT department is limited by Turing's famous Halting Problem:

Given a complete set of requirements and a working prototype, will the IT department ever finish writing software that meets those requirements?

Okay, that was sarcastic, but illustrates a real problem, which is that doing it in Excel is making something, whereas getting IT involved is managing something -- a category error. The problems of managing software development are unchanged, half a century after The Mythical Man Month.

I have to say, “complete set of requirements” is quite the oxymoron.

Indeed, communicating requirements is one of the hardest parts of managing anything technical. Especially if you're working with people who are a couple steps removed from the background domain knowledge.

Haha, but traders are traders. What they say is mostly an effect of whether their stuff is performing or not.

IT departments has a perverted love of locking everything down, which makes basically everything useless except what is already provisioned.

Asking for software is like a gestapo interrogation - your always not right and in the end all motives are questioned.

IT solves IT's problems by externalising the costs into the teams they purportedly serve.

Haha, I can totally believe that at a big firm. I'm at a prop shop and we're much more outcome focused than that.

I'm in energy trading and wonder what the tech setups are in other companies. Can you tell me something about yours?

We currently migrate everything to the cloud, which breaks many Excels that so far got their inputs from on-prem services or the file system. What could previously be deployed without second thought now requires extensive, decentralized cloud knowledge in each team. Power is taken from the lay business user. What took seconds in VBA now requires a feature request to a dev team.. it's insane.

Yep. We have all of our backtesting and analysis in the cloud. Python notebooks for analysis. Java for backtesting. C++ for performance critical or for where Java API is not useful.

I'm in HFT so we have software engineers available to our portfolio managers. Everything is in code.

Live strategies are deployed via a script that ultimately ssh to a machine, plops a set of artifacts in from storage, and then runs. But everything needs to restart together.