- ITIL: A formalized way of delivering IT services
- Processes: The structured actions taken between an input and an output
- Cleaning your room: Tidying and removing dirt from your room before the guests arrive
If you never ever clean your room, wash the dishes or your clothes, water the plants or make dinner, the gap between your skills and your mother’s skills in these areas will keep widening. Your skills will be handicapped by your mother’s empathy and care.
If you establish processes in an organization that is supposed to take care of issues and problems for the employees, it wil handicap their abilities to handle this themselves.
In the ITIL framework, you are supposed to establish some 27 processes to cater for every part of IT service delivery in an organization. One such process is Problem Management. The purpose of this process is to handle the underlying cause of one or more issues so that it doesn’t happen again. When this is turned into a process where a subset of employees gets to be experts at detecting problems, conduct root causes analysis and solve the problems, the gap between the skills of these guys and the rest keeps widening. The process will handicap the employees problem solving skills.
Problem solving should be a skill exercized by every employee. It should be part of the company’s culture, their DNA. Everyone should jump at the opportunity to solve problems they encounter. It will hone their skills and keep them valuable as efficient problem solvers. Those who encounter a specific problem has more initial data about it and can usually solve it quicker… if they have excellent problem solving skills.
Don’t relegate important skills sets to only certain processes. Help everyone exercize and fine-tune their skills in fire-fighting, problem solving, change management, customer handling, documentation and strategic thinking.
Geir Isene - uncut 
It is good advice. It makes sense to have all hands cleaning stations such as one’s own desk and immediate work area. Then again, an employer may balk at using specialized talent costing $75/hr and up doing janitorial. The employer may feel this is a waste of resource, so may the specialized employee. In our home, my wife errs on the side of doing too much for us, and if in error, I do too little. My kids are held responsible for their own bath area and bedrooms. They do a pretty good job and I feel that will benefit them as they move away from home into their own dwellings and lives. Now if I can only get Shelley to let them touch her precious washing machine, lol.