My company recently implemented a content filtration system (Websense) which ranges anywhere from mildly irritating to enraging depending on what useful website it's blocking and what program I have to configure proxy settings on in order to get my work done.
As a developer, I'd definitely say that it's caused me to lose a lot of perfectly good time implementing workarounds and generally causing me to lose my "flow" as I work. I'm sure hundreds of other employees at my company have had similar experiences, so it's easy to see the enormity of the number of dollars being thrown away if you figure each interruption can cause developers to lose on the order of 15 minutes of productivity.
Personally, I'd love to see the whole thing removed and have the company trust its employees not to be evil in using resources. Of course, this would probably never fly because the higher ups probably imagine everyone would be on social networking and music sites all day, and that people would be downloading programs loaded with viruses and spyware.
Given all this, is there any non-intrusive automated system (not manually-entered blacklists) out there which will satisfy management and developers at the same time? Preferably one that doesn't yell at me for trying to download Firefox? I'd love to recommend it to our IT department.