In my experience in IT, as you are going from place to place in the office people would try to 'grab' you to help with something. I always acquiesced to this and would always see if I could share any techniques that would help the user in general based on the workflow I was seeing.
You also have to deal with people perceiving your optimizations as a threat to their job security.
I see it as a form of process improvement, but instead of analyzing inter-employee/department processes, you're analyzing the processes and individual goes through.
Ticketing systems are a pain in the ass. I get the point of them, and I think they can be really valuable, but they so quickly become bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy.
My team is pretty free to decide how we do things right now, and we're considering adopting some form of issue tracking so we can get a better idea internally what's going on, but we're wary of it becoming ticket hell. More than likely the ticket will only ever be referenced inside the team and we'll just try to use it as a way to make sure we're collectively not losing track of things.
We should do more of this stuff, you are correct. The proper question, and maybe after the New Year we can send out a survey asking it, is What tedious and repetitive tasks are getting in the way of your real work?