Oh, I've worked in big companies. I was just trying to be an optimist here.
As an example where my optimism is warranted: broken builds. You can either make it a `people problem' and tell people to be super careful; or you go for the technical solution and automate the whole thing, so that only commits that build and pass tests get merged into master.
Of course, there's no office politics in my example; so this was easy.
The humble spreadsheet liberated white collar workers to do automate simple (and not so simple) calculation tasks themselves. No begging the computer folks necessary any more, who can hold your department `hostage' at will.
You can bet that from the point of view of spreadsheet adopters, they sidestepped a whole host of political problems.
Say there's 20 pounds of work for 10 pounds of (recently downsized) people across multiple departments. The way you'd like to see technology work is turn 20 pound of work into 10 or less pounds of work for the entire company. The way technology is actually used in the real corporate world is your boss has you automate procedures and policies such that you push work out of your department and onto even more overloaded competing departments. That's how the strongest competitors are determined for promotion and bonus.
To some extent its a startup vs old company problem. Trust me, if technology could be applied to solve the whole company wide problem, grandpa would have already done it with punchcards decades ago, the only innovation that happens in old companies is pushing work and blame onto other departments. Hey, I have a number that proves we're now better, and that's all that matters.
The other way it works is as a weapon / scapegoat. They don't wanna work with us and I don't want to force them, or can't make them. But I can tell my programmer to change the bounds checking on that input field and they'll be forced to cooperate or shut down. If it works and they cooperate with us, I'll take the credit, if it fails, I'll blame and fire the programmer. Or if you don't want them to work with us (as in dump work on us) the programmer can sabotage their system, and again you can guess the different pathways for reward and punishment.