Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For decades, IT operations have followed a familiar model. Specialized teams manage different parts of the environment, from infrastructure and networks to security and endpoint management. When employees encounter issues, they submit tickets to the service desk, which are then triaged, escalated, and resolved. This structure has endured because it provided a reliable way to maintain system health and respond to problems as they arise.

Modern businesses need infrastructure that can scale as quickly as their demands change. Yet many organizations still struggle with infrastructure that is costly to maintain, difficult to expand, and slow to adapt to new requirements. As applications, users, and data continue to grow, managing resources efficiently becomes increasingly challenging. Cloud infrastructure provides a more flexible approach.

Enterprise IT was built for a more predictable workplace, where support began when an employee reported a problem and IT worked backward from the details they could provide. That model made sense when devices, applications, and ways of working were easier to control. Today, the digital workplace moves too quickly for IT to rely on reported issues alone. By the time a ticket appears, employees may have already lost time, worked around the problem, abandoned the tool, or turned to an unmanaged alternative.

Repetitive work is what slows down most service desks, not a lack of people. Most IT teams spend their day handling repetitive work like password resets, ticket routing, access approvals, and standard service requests. This creates constant backlog pressure, slows resolution, and increases avoidable errors. Adding more people does not solve the underlying issue. ITSM automation addresses this by moving routine, rule-based tasks into automated workflows.

How much of service desk work is problem solving and how much is repeat work that continues every day? Most service desks follow the same pattern daily. Password resets, access requests, software installs, approvals, and routine fixes keep coming in. These tasks are simple on their own, yet together they take most of the team’s time and push important incidents further down the queue. The main challenge is the constant flow of repeat work that reduces time for focused tasks.

Software moves from code to production more quickly today, but it is still difficult to tell whether delivery is actually improving or just becoming more active. Most teams rely on dashboards filled with metrics like deployments, uptime, failures, and tickets. The numbers are available, but the meaning behind them is often unclear. DevOps metrics become useful only when grouped into clear categories: DORA metrics cover only delivery speed and stability, which is just part of the picture.

ServiceNow's internal IT operations now resolve more than 90% of employee requests through autonomous agents. The platform that demonstrated this in Las Vegas earlier this month is the same platform sitting in your environment right now. So why isn't your operation running the same way? This is the question every CIO should have walked out of Knowledge 2026 with.