In my experience you are right - IT will always deny these requests, so you need to build the solutions in a way that avoids accessing existing DBs.

Usually it’s replacing a spreadsheet, so either the information can be manually keyed in or can be imported from various reports. Sometimes you even get into screen scraping, sometimes scheduled reports that are getting dumped to a drive and getting imported… basically any way that avoids needing to get permission from the IT team.