Regarding putting things in the hands of others: another good example is data analysis. Say you're the sole programmer at a startup and all your time is focused on building your product. But you also have lots of data coming in that needs to be sliced up and visualized. Write a script that sticks your data in a format your business-types can easily work with (hint: spreadsheet). And let them go at it.

Of course this is a general approach for analysis. Get the data into a tool that makes data exploration easier: R, Excel, matlab. That rather than writing lots of custom scripts.