With IRC you can set up an organizational IRC server. Local users connect to it rather than "wild servers." Set up the IRC server to implement appropriate screening for your organization.
I've done just this for a small neighborhood wisp. There are users of varying skill levels who want to be a part of the noc team. Rather than creating on important servers, or giving access to routers, for purposes of diagnosis, I'm using the perl Net::IRC module to build a number of small bots with very specific functions... e.g. syslog messages and mrtg stats sent to a noc channel. The next level will be to write a bot some with interactive access on the network so a request to 'traceroute x' or 'sh int' can be done by anyone with channel ops (and everyone present gets the benefit of the ouput if there's a problem). Eventually I will tie this into some type of text-to-speech on the client side, so that critical conditions can be brought to our attention even if the window is out of focus or we're all afk. It's not hard to use SSH tunneling / VPN as well, ensuring that the noc console application can be used securely across untrusted networks. Mike