'Hi, I'm From IT, and I'm Here to Help'

Computerworld - My company has a hard time maintaining its profit margins. Customers can buy what we sell (stuff like paper cups, plastic spoons, paper towels, mops and floor wax) from lots of other companies. The prices we can charge are always being driven down.
So how do we avoid having our profits squeezed to nothing? IT helps. We start when one of us walks into a business meeting and says, "Hi, I'm from IT, and I'm here to help." The business people in my company are glad to hear this because my IT staffers are becoming masters of the 80% solution: We identify the repetitious things the business people do. As the company grows, such routine work (typically 70% to 90% of what they do) is overwhelming these users. The IT group is learning to design and quickly roll out simple systems that automate this routine work. These systems are cheap and quick to build because we never try to automate anything that isn't routine.
I see this as a major paradigm shift. For the past 30 years or more, people in IT have dreaded questions like, "Yes, but what about this?" or, "Can your system handle that?" Those comments always focus on exceptions to the general rules that a system is built to handle. Often, they have the power to stop new systems dead. They cause IT people to add complexity and expense to otherwise simple systems in order to handle exceptions that happen only once in a while.
In the past, such comments were often voiced by people who didn't want computers anyway and who were motivated to come up with ways to delay or stop a rollout of new systems. Times have changed. Older people have gotten used to computers, and younger people can't imagine living without them. And everyone's workload has doubled or tripled.
There's no longer a need to build complex systems to appease obstructionists, because there aren't many of them left. And since workflows change quickly and the most complex workflows change the fastest, why spend a lot of time automating them? Instead, learn to see complexity as combinations of simple, repetitive tasks and automate the simplest and most repetitive of them.
Figuratively speaking, people in my company are often too busy mopping to fix the leak. So we in IT build cheap, simple systems to do the mopping and free people up to figure out why the leak is happening and how best to fix it. Once freed from the burden of routine tasks,