I had an interesting discussion with my team yesterday in which I discovered some believe their job is to fix problems as people bring them to us.

I considered this an utter and complete failure on my part to instill in them the purpose of IT. MAYBE that applies to a level 1 help desk person, but then again I don't believe in those folks and that's why they don't exist on my team.

We should want people who are smarter than the computers they fix, following a set instruction for each issue and never deviating. I think they should be spending their effort and brain power to make sure issues don't come up with to begin with, don't you? To me rote fixing of the same issue repeatedly is an attitude is akin to data entry. You are going to take the information from point A and type it into point B. It takes no particular skill or creativity, just memorizing a set of solutions. Boring!

IT is like chess. Chess is fun. There are a lot of moving parts that behave differently. If you think one move ahead, i.e. fixing the problem directly in front of you, you will occasionally win against unskilled opponents. The problem is todays workforce is not unskilled any more. They are increasingly tech savvy and able to solve their own problems. We have no value in a world where IT knows as much as your average high schooler about the systems we work on. When everyone can compete thinking one move, you need to think at least two to even provide value. Preferably three to four moves ahead to be making a real difference for your company. If your staff are not consistently out preforming the average (or even above average) person at your company, why are you paying them?

The world is changing for IT. It's becoming more interconnected and our problems are only getting harder. This comes with it a grand opportunity to embrace that to automate our world and enable users to help themselves. Industry standard help-desk ratios have been shrinking from 1:70 to 1:180 while application support is on the rise.

To  keep up we need to be ridding ourselves of busy work. Don't think about how to solve a single problem for a single user right now, but how to you make sure NO user needs to come to you with that problem ever again. If you can't do that, you will be crushes beneath the weight of your button pushing.

We should also be thinking ahead when asked for things like software. Don't assume what they are asking for is what they need. Understand the issue they are trying to solve, and know your industry and world well enough to  know the best way to solve that problem. Maybe they are coming to you with something you've never seen. That's great, learn. But also understand the base issue the person you are trying to help is trying to solve.

Computers, software, these are tools to solve productivity problems. To think several moves ahead you need to understand the workflows and productivity headaches of your company better than they do. THAT is what we do.

IT should be striving to ensure problems don't exist to begin with, not just fixing them when they do.