Huh... I would have argued not doing it the way I described was prematurely optimizing. Specifically, it's about throwing 'processing speed' at a problem before checking whether that actually speeds up the solution.

If someone is roadblocked on all their work, yeah, that should be solved immediately. Even if it's less theoretically efficient than some customer service system, it's necessary in terms of treating people with respect.

But if someone has a specific task blocked? I'm not at all convinced escalating that to a programmer or DBA is a reasonable step one. Partly because the problem might be simple, mostly because switching time causes real inefficiencies.

Of course, I'm assuming competent systems here. If "IT" is an outsourced department that just tells you how to plug things in, then yeah, everyone should escalate past them quickly. But if IT is actually knowledgeable, devops has sensible workflows, and so on, then I worry that out-of-band solutions are faster on each individual issue, but end up net-negative on overall company efficiency.