how to escalate a problem

[Benjamin Barrett]

This topic came up a short while ago and I was surprised how novel it seemed
to be even among people who are pretty techie.

In the redux, James Sparks described differences between escalation and
elevation, as used in two companies:

Benjamin Barrett
Baking the World a Better Place
www.hiroki.us

From: James Sparks <jsparks at alamedanet.net>
To: <honyaku at yahoogroups.com>
Reply-To: honyaku at yahoogroups.com
Date: Aug 15 2005 - 7:51pm

I followed with fascination the recent thread about the
business-speak meaning of escalate, as I, like the OP, had never seen
the word used in this meaning.
At a dinner party last Saturday, I asked two friends who work in the
business world if they knew how the word is used in business English,
and sure enough, their definitions closely matched those given here.
However, they both said that escalate is used in contradistinction to
elevate (another usage that was new to me!). One said that in his firm,
an issue is elevated when it stays in-house, but escalated when some
outside source is involved. The other said that elevate is most often
used in a positive connotation, while escalate is used negatively.
I'm not a business translator, have no strong opinion about all
this, and am only reporting what two informed friends told me, so please
don't shoot the messenger. I just thought that the OP and others might
be interested to hear about this.

James Sparks

> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society
> [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of George Thompson
>
> This is from a reply to a message to the Tech Support desk of
> CSA, a database supplier, regarding a failure of their system:
>
> "Thank you very much for contacting CSA Technical Support and
> please accept my apologies, both for the late answer and the
> inconvenience this problem is causing you. We appreciate your
> report as it allows us to escalate problems quickly and see
> them resolved within a reasonable amount of time.
> "This particular problem seems to affect users around the
> globe and it has been escalated to our development team in
> Bethesda, MD. As soon as they come in this morning they will
> start to look into this and hopefully resolve the issue by
> the end of today."