Technology Rewired: IT Operations

How has the it operations team changed across five eras?

1. Era 1 · On-prem

   Before 2005

   0.4

   IT was a help desk phone line, a few desk-side technicians, and a build room where PCs were imaged one at a time. A small team handled installs, password resets, printer problems, and the occasional server, and the person who knew where everything lived was the real configuration database. Asset tracking lived in a spreadsheet that was wrong by the time it was saved.

   The work was physical and local. If you wanted a fix, someone walked to your desk.

2. Era 2 · SaaS and cloud

   2005 to 2020

   1.2

   SaaS ITSM, device management, and single sign-on let a small team run a remote fleet and hundreds of SaaS apps. The roles split: a service desk for requests, an endpoint engineer who owned the device policies, an identity admin who owned SSO, and sometimes a separate person chasing software licenses.

   Service catalogs and automation cut some tickets. Resets, access requests, and app sprawl kept the queue full, and shadow IT meant the team often learned about an app after the data was already in it.

3. Era 3 · AI-assisted

   2020 to 2024

   1.8

   Virtual agents and ML routing arrived in the service desk. They classified tickets, suggested knowledge articles, and deflected the simple requests. The technician's job barely changed: read the ticket, open the admin console, make the change, close the ticket.

   The tools got better at triage and worse at nothing, so the queue got shorter without the team getting smaller.

4. Era 4 · Agentic

   2024 onward

   2.3

   Agents now handle access requests, password and MFA resets with identity checks, app provisioning, and common device fixes directly in the underlying systems. The service desk shifts from doing the work to approving the privileged parts and tuning the policies. Reset flows are a favorite attack path, so verification design matters more than speed, as your help desk is the new perimeter shows.

   The same logic applies to the recovery path itself. An agent that can reset anything inherits the security ceiling of the flow it uses, which I cover in account recovery design.

5. Era 5 · Next 5 years

   2026 to 2031

   3.4

   My bet: most routine IT requests resolve without a human touching them, and IT teams become platform owners who design policies, identity checks, and automations. The service desk shrinks; endpoint and identity engineering grow. The measure of a good IT team stops being ticket time and becomes how few tickets exist.

Which it operations software is being rewired?

No deep dives yet. The first ones are in the queue below.

Coming next

• IT service managementwave 3
• Device management (MDM)
• SaaS management
• IT asset management
• Password managers
• Remote support
• Network monitoring

Also wired into this category: Firewall and Network Security, Help Desk and Ticketing, SIEM and SOC Platforms, Workforce Identity and Access Management (IAM).