How do I convince my IT dept to support exchange on my iPhone?

Question

I work for a large non-profit social services agency in New York City. We use Exchange Server 2003 for our corporate email. Our IT dept just manages to keep everything running and is notoriously slow at making changes or fixing problems (they've been known to leave accounts of employees who've left the company active for months after they've left).
My particular part of the company runs a scatter site housing program. Because its scatter-site I spend 70%+ of my time in the field. I got an iPhone about a week after I started and its been incredibly helpful in a variety of ways. I can obviously access my Exchange Webmail through safari but it is incredibly slow and tedious, and its impossible to view attachments to emails.
It would be amazing if I could use the mail app on the iPhone to view my mail, and I asked one of the IT guys if they could set up exchange access for my iPhone. After a few weeks and half a dozen emails, IT said that they "couldn't figure it out." Since 3.0 came out last week, I decided to ask again, and the response was "We only provide support for BlackBerry at this point both IMAP and POP3 are turned off."
Anyway, i think one of the reasons they are so restrictive is because most of our programs are bound under a federal law called HIPAA to maintain total confidentiality about all of our clients. I think this is also why Outlook only seems to be available if you are on the company intranet (which my office is not, another pain). And as mentioned, IMAP and POP3 are turned off.
I guess basically my question is, how secure is the exchange connection with iPhone, and how easily can it be implemented? and once that is established, for what legitimate reasons (if any) might my IT dept not want to activate ActiveSync but support BlackBerry?
And finally, is there any good argument I could use to convince them to implement it? I personally know of at least 4 other employees who use iPhones (and I don't know all that many people in the company)
Thanks In Advance

Answer 1

In order to access an Exchange account with a Blackberry, a company must pay RIM for access to their Blackberry Enterprise Server, which is on an annual basis and I understand is not cheap.
Microsoft includes ActiveSync access with the Exchange server software, which doesn't cost a company anything extra, nor does it cost a company anything extra when accessing an Exchange account via ActiveSync with an iPhone. Apple licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft for use with the iPhone's Mail client. Your company must pay RIM in order to access an Exchange account with a Blackberry.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/integration.html
http://images.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/docs/iPhoneMSExchange.pdf