PRIORITIES REPORTS 2025

INFRASTUCTURE & OPERATIONS
PRIORITIES '25

INTRODUCTION

Analyst Perspective

Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) must be able to articulate how it provides value to the business.

In an ideal world, the most mature IT shop would help transform the organization: give it a competitive advantage, help generate revenue and/or expand the organization’s aims, and proactively deliver and support the IT services and enterprise systems that allow the organization to flourish.

Yet, too often, IT finds itself in a reactive role, focused on fixing what is broken instead of proactively building more resilient systems and processes.

This is not for a lack of talented, forward-thinking professionals – IT professionals know what they need, where they would like to be, and what is holding them back. Generally, they are constrained by familiar obstacles, like technical debt and demands to cut costs, as well as other factors, such as lack of buy-in, lack of time, lack of communication, lack of coordination and planning, economic vagaries, volatile political developments, and cybersecurity threats, that add complexity and risk.

Resilience means being prepared to do things in a new way as the ground shifts, creating and protecting the framework within which your organization can work safely and productively.

To do this, IT needs to articulate how it is delivering value to the organization. The highest level of Info-Tech’s maturity model describes an IT organization that delivers value, which necessitates being in a position to be proactive instead of reactive. But what does value mean to your organization? If you haven’t started the conversation about what value you provide to the business, how can you do a better job building the enterprise systems you are responsible for keeping up and running? For 2025, I&O can embrace an expanded vision of its role in the organization, not just as fixers of things that are broken, but as collaborators and builders of something more resilient. That resilience is a key driver for value.

As more and more aspects of I&O’s key capabilities are automated, as cloud services increase in use, and with the prospect of aspects of I&O functions being offloaded to AI, I&O must be able to articulate how it provides value to the business. To do this, I&O needs to achieve a level of maturity that allows it a seat at the innovation table.

Emily Sugerman Senior Research Analyst Infrastructure & Operations Info-Tech Research Group

IT struggles to move much further beyond the support function

How do IT professionals rate their maturity level, especially from the perspective of IT’s ability to make a difference to the business/organization? As seen below, compared to last year, respondents to Info-Tech’s Future of IT 2025 Survey reported a small overall increase in maturity. However, 43% still place themselves in the support role or lower.

Moreover, Future of IT 2025 Survey respondents are more optimistic than the respondents to Info-Tech’s CIO-CEO Alignment diagnostic, where 71% of CxOs and 68% of CIOs assess IT as being in the support role or lower (2023-2024; n=77).

How is I&O doing?

IT teams agree: the functions I&O performs are important. Yet confidence in effectiveness reveals a capability gap.

Turning more specifically to I&O maturity, we can also look at how IT teams rate their own performance across specific IT management and governance capabilities. In the previous iteration of Info-Tech’s IT Management & Governance Framework, the I&O group owned eight capabilities. Over the last year, via the IT Management & Governance Diagnostic, IT teams rated their own effectiveness at executing these capabilities, along with their perception of the importance of these capabilities.

Consistently, respondents rated themselves as less effective at executing these capabilities compared to the capabilities’ perceived importance when both were rated separately on a ten-point scale, with an average effectiveness score of 67% across all eight capabilities (n=239).

(IT Management & Governance Diagnostic, 2023-2024; n=239)

Bringing value to the business

I&O is no longer a series of silos and individual groups nor a call center reactively servicing tickets. Moreover, automation and AI change the nature of the execution of these capabilities and drive I&O increasingly toward strategic activities and opportunities to develop and mature other supporting capabilities.

To better execute on its core capabilities, to be able to set a direction for infrastructure and cloud strategy, and to avoid being pigeonholed as reactive, I&O must draw on and improve the other capabilities found across the IT Management & Governance Framework, including but not limited to:

• Business Continuity Management
• IT Innovation Strategy
• Stakeholder Alignment & Management
• Knowledge Management
• Talent Management
• Vendor Performance Management
• Risk Management
• IT Portfolio Management

All these capabilities will come into play in the discussion of key I&O priorities for 2025.

Moving from trends to priorities

Understand the infrastructure & operations priorities by analyzing both how I&O leaders respond to trends in general and how specific I&O leaders responded in the context of their organization.

CONTEXTUAL INSIGHTS

A priority is created when external factors hold strong synergy with internal goals and an organization responds by committing resources to either avert risk or seize opportunity.

PRIORITY INSIGHTS

For each priority, this report will examine how I&O leaders are responding to the implications of the external trends impacting their organization. We'll consider the capabilities that play a role in responding to the opportunities and threats and suggest an initiative to improve them. Case studies from I&O leaders planning for 2025 provide specific insight, and Info-Tech resources are recommended to help clients take action on priorities.

INFRASTRUCTURE & OPERATIONS
PRIORITIES 2025

• 01 Embrace the Changing Role of I&O
• 02 Develop a Relationship Management Strategy
• 03 Build Resilience Across Systems and People
• 04 Manage the Growing SaaS Footprint
• 05 Design Flexible and Secure End-User Computing Solutions

Methodology

Data in this report is gathered from the following sources:

IT Talent Trends 2025 Survey

Info-Tech’s IT Talent Trends 2025 Survey collected responses from April to May 2024 with Centiment. The online survey analyzed 461 responses from IT professionals from organizations of various sizes and industries.

Future of IT 2025 Survey

The Future of IT 2025 Survey was conducted by Info-Tech between May and June 2024. The online survey received 970 responses from IT decision-makers across a broad range of industries and regions, with a focus on North America. Almost six out of ten respondents hold director-level seniority or higher.

Info-Tech Diagnostics

Diagnostic benchmark reports including CEO-CIO Alignment, CIO Business Vision, End User Satisfaction, and the IT Management & Governance Diagnostic reflect Info-Tech member results for the period of August 1, 2023 to July 31, 2024. Diagnostic benchmark reports for the IT Staffing Assessment reflect Info-Tech member results for the period of June 17, 2023 to June 17, 2024. Sample sizes for specific metrics will be provided where data from these diagnostics are used in this report.

Priorities Interviews

In-depth interviews were conducted with IT leaders between August and October of 2024 to collect insights on priority-making and agenda-setting for 2025. Use the linked Info-Tech research to dive deeper into these topics and help turn the roadmap into reality.

PRIORITY 01

EMBRACE THE CHANGING ROLE OF I&O

Shift I&O away from reactive work so it can partner with the organization earlier in the solutioning process.

• IT Innovation Strategy
• Stakeholder Alignment & Management

01 Embrace the changing role of I&O

The role of I&O is changing

CORE CAPABILITIES

On Info-Tech’s new IT Management & Governance Framework, I&O owns seven core capabilities. The execution of these capabilities is, or will be, impacted by drivers like automation, AIOps, increased use of cloud services, and hybrid and remote work.

• Infrastructure & Cloud Strategy: Manage and optimize IT infrastructure effectively in alignment with business goals and objectives. Build a comprehensive overall strategy that includes the infrastructure roadmap as well as strategies for cloud, network, software as a service, and end-user devices.
  • Multicloud environments; edge computing; infrastructure to support remote and hybrid work.
• Asset & Configuration Management: Manage IT/OT assets through their lifecycle to make sure they deliver value at optimal cost, remain operational, and are accounted for and physically protected. Ensure that assets are reliable and available as needed. This includes SAM, HAM, ITAM, and SaaS management.
  • AI-enhanced recommendations for right-sizing software licenses; automation of inventory restock.
• Operations Management: Manage the activities and operational procedures required to deliver IT services, including standard operating procedures and monitoring activities. This includes cloud operations and management, system maintenance, and FinOps.
  • Automation of network connectivity tests, system health checks, and event management; proactive maintenance and alert correlation performed by AI/ML; establishment of cross-functional FinOps practice to better manage value from cloud spend.
• Change & Release Management: Manage all IT system changes in a controlled manner, including standard changes to and emergency maintenance of the services IT offers relating to business processes, applications, and infrastructure. Enable fast and reliable delivery of change to the business and mitigate risks to the stability of the environment.
  • Automation of change approval process; proactive analysis of changes using AI insights.
• Incident & Problem Management: Identify and classify problems and their root causes and provide timely resolution to prevent recurring incidents. Reduce the number of operational problems.
  • AI incident matching, discovery, and logging.
• Availability & Capacity Management: Balance current and future needs for availability, performance, and capacity of IT systems and infrastructure by forecasting future performance and capacity requirements.
  • AI and ML algorithms that perform forecasting and capacity analysis.
• Service Desk: Provide timely and effective response to user requests and resolution of all types of incidents. Restore normal service; record and fulfill user requests; and record, investigate, diagnose, escalate, and resolve incidents.
  • Automated service desk ticket categorization, prioritization, and routing; integration of chatbots with AI.

However, IT’s time is still eaten up by maintenance

• Despite these prospects for optimizing core I&O processes and shifting to different types of work, IT time allocation remains stable year over year.
• Respondents to Info-Tech’s IT Staffing Assessment report that 34% of their time is taken up by maintaining existing technology and IT processes (n=148).
• The promise of AI and automation is to drive down the manual aspect of this work. But are organizations prepared to use AI to improve IT operations? Thirty-nine percent of Future of IT 2025 Survey respondents state that their organizations have already acquired an AI vendor solution for IT, with another 21% planning to by the end of 2025 (n=401). The top three types of solutions acquired were for IT security, BI & analytics, and service desk (n=344).
• How open are organizations to leveraging AI?

(IT Staffing Assessment, 2023-2024; n=148)

Organizations anticipate an overall positive impact from AI

The Future of IT 2025 Survey indicates a growing openness to exploring AI use cases. For instance, respondents do anticipate that AI will disrupt the business, but most anticipate it will be a positive change.

Respondents are more willing to move out of a neutral wait-and-see position and adopt a positive outlook regarding the impact AI will have on the organization.

Overall, organizations’ optimism regarding the nature of the impact increased compared to last year, with half asserting that AI will have a somewhat positive impact and benefit the business, compared to 39% last year.

Top business value drivers for pursuing AI initiatives in the organization are:

• Improve operational excellence.
• Improve the customer/citizen/user experience.
• Drive innovation.

(n=395)

AIOps

When asked about how IT innovation should contribute to the business, the most popular answer for CxOs and CIOs is improved business processes (CIO-CEO Alignment, 2023-2024; n=77). Many AI use cases and pilots understandably focus on improving business processes. But how can AI help enhance IT operations as well?

AIOps is the practice of supporting organizational agility and enhancing IT operations by using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help automate the detection of incidents, their analysis and resolution, and even their prediction and prevention. The end goal: to identify, resolve, and even prevent issues more quickly. In essence, AIOps aims to turn AI into the ticket taker that performs the reactive work, runs scripts for maintenance, and frees up time for staff.

Real-time analysis of operational data, enabled by AIOps, should benefit the business in many ways, including:

IT

• Reduced risk of “alert fatigue.”
• Automated creation of tickets as a result of the algorithm’s analysis.
• Better root cause analysis.
• Improved security due to faster mean time to detect security breaches.

BUSINESS

• Improved satisfaction due to IT’s improved adherence to SLAs.
• Virtual assistants that can interact with end users, help fulfill simple requests, and help open tickets that can’t immediately been resolved.
• Improved end-user productivity: Fewer service interruptions due to early prediction and prevention of issues.

Opportunities

Organizations that automate more and more aspects of I&O’s key capabilities and/or enable AIOps need to plan how to invest the time no longer being used for manual processes. How does I&O position itself to show its value?

This shift raises the question: What becomes of the humans’ role when you successfully automate and implement AI to assist with IT operations? This is an opportunity for I&O to redefine itself and ask, How are we delivering value? The pitch of automation and AI is that they change the role of IT staff and should free up their time to focus on more complex work or work that delivers more value. But what, exactly, is this higher-value work?

EARLY SOLUTIONING

Is IT perceived as a partner in innovation? Info-Tech’s End User Satisfaction diagnostic data shows that end users report 77% satisfaction with IT’s ability to bring innovative technology to the organization for competitive advantage (n=239). Though by no means a failing grade, this result happens to be the lowest satisfaction score in that survey.

The CEO-CIO Alignment diagnostic shows that CIOs believe the second biggest IT barrier to innovation is poor communication between business and IT (behind the cost and difficulty of replacing legacy systems). The top two most significant business barriers to innovation are the business staff culture’s resistance to innovation and a lack of clear direction or prioritization by the business, even beating out the barrier of lack of funding (n=77).

To position itself as an innovator within the organization, I&O needs to strategically move closer to the business/organization and become involved earlier in the process of designing solutions. In the traditional enterprise IT approach, business groups speak with vendors and then approach IT with a design. Instead, I&O needs to be part of the architecture. Without enterprise architecture (EA) leaders at the table during ideation and early intake, I&O planning, projects, proactive budgeting, and decision-making are impeded and I&O’s reactive role as ticket taker is reinforced.

I&O needs to move up the stack and start getting involved much earlier in solutioning. A modern I&O team builds platforms to build upon. Those platforms are based on standards designed with a deep understanding of the business/organization and the ability to solution for them early on. EA staff and services need to be involved in the front end of intake and client requests requiring new or upscaled infrastructure.

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE

Building IT’s culture around partnering with the business

Chris Reeve, CIO, Uniting AgeWell

An IT leader speaks to IT’s need to understand its role in the broader organization, along with the organization’s purpose and the work employees do:

“We want everyone in our operations teams, architecture teams, development teams, backend database teams, and data engineers to understand where they fit in the ecosystem of the organization. We want to ensure each of our teams understand where they fit in that puzzle and that they don’t see themselves just as an IT person – they are a business partner to the organization and each one of them contributes to the success of the organization.

“Every week when I speak with my team, we talk about what value we are bringing. How are we partnering with the business? How is the business seeing us as a partner – not just a support service but actually an enabler for them across the organization? What expertise can we bring in to help the business solve a problem, even if the solution isn’t technical but about business process redesign? How do we make sure that we are also leading and being part of that conversation, rather than just saying it’s not an IT issue? Being able to partner in this way requires having that holistic view of the organization.”

How should organizations approach the development of generative AI pilots and use cases?

“Organizations that are interested in genAI need to ensure that they take advantage of that technology when it’s right, for the right reasons and in a secure way. One of the things I’m very conscious of as an IT leader is that staff don’t actually want to spend too much time interacting with technology – their primary role is to provide care to our customers, and to spend too much time interacting with technology would be counterproductive for them. Pilot projects need to have these goals in mind: How do we reduce the touchpoints and the time taken? How do we increasingly surface the most relevant information to staff in a timely way when they need it?

“Essentially, what we should be able to do is allow people to easily ask the questions they need to ask. That’s the level at which they will be supported and empowered.”

Risks: Skills, cost, and technical debt

Implementation of AIOps raises several potential organizational risks, mostly related to the ability to put an operational framework around AI services. Future of IT 2025 Survey respondents reported that the top three challenges that hinder the adoption of AI initiatives are:

• Lack of AI or data management skills.
• AI governance. (Effective AI governance involves creating the governance structure and operating model that will identify AI’s key risks to the organization and establish the responsible AI principles that the organization will adopt – principles that will apply just as much to IT as to the rest of the business.)
• Data platform not optimized for AI.

Skill gaps: With AIOps, the role of the staff shifts to monitoring that process, validating its outputs, and continuing to train and fine-tune the ML algorithm. This requires staff to have or obtain data science skills to perform activities such as data normalization: the conversion of high volumes of data from disparate sources into formats compatible with data analytics tools.

IT staff recognize the need to keep skills current. Only 5% think that no skill changes will be needed by 2030. Fifty-one percent think at least some skills will need to change, and 45% think that either all or most skills will need to change. The two most important skills organizations will need are Cybersecurity and AI & Machine Learning (IT Talent Trends 2025 Survey, 2024; n=404).

Cost: When procuring new technology solutions, Future of IT 2025 Survey respondents prioritize first cost and ROI and then features and functionality (n=445). When it comes to devoting scarce budgetary resources to exploring AIOps, unfamiliarity with the new technology required and the AIOps platform vendor space may impede leadership buy-in. To make the case for these tools, organizations will need to understand and be able to articulate how they will produce a return on investment.

Tech debt: CIOs and their business counterparts agree: Tech debt (the cost and difficulty of replacing legacy systems) is the top organizational barrier to innovation (CIO-CEO Alignment, 2023-2024; n=77). Legacy systems and infrastructure can hold organizations back from being able to use siloed data for AIOps purposes.

Risks: Governance and culture

Other risks relate more specifically to the organization’s preparedness for AI governance and data quality assurance as well as the organization’s existing practices around knowledge transfer.

Lack of AI governance framework: It takes time and effort to create policies and documentation around responsible AI use, such as addressing serious concerns around the environmental impact and sustainability. The OECD remarks, “Responsible data management practices can play a pivotal role in minimizing unnecessary data storage, which would reduce the environmental impact of AI. … We can significantly decrease AI’s environmental footprint by adopting management strategies prioritizing data minimization, efficient storage, and responsible data disposal” (OECD, 2024). Organizations seek guidance on AI governance most often from vendors, consultants/advisory services, and standards bodies. However, not every organization has put this governance together.

• 40% of Future of IT 2025 Survey respondents say their organization’s AI strategy is being developed or will be developed soon.
• 26% say there is no specific AI strategy, but it will be part of IT and business strategies.
• 19% say an AI strategy is in place for some business areas (including IT) (n=408).

Lack of a data-centric culture: Organizations must be open to investing in the technology and time needed to ensure high volumes of data are clean and usable to produce business insights and aid decision-making.

Lack of a mature knowledge management culture: Successful implementation of AIOps use cases requires the ability to develop pilot use cases, apply feedback, share best practices, and create cross-functional groups, like an AI center of excellence, to facilitate that knowledge sharing and feedback loop. Thirteen percent of Future of IT 2025 Survey respondents claim that a group such as an AI center of excellence exists in their organization and is accountable for AI governance (n=443).

From priorities to action

Begin exploring the opportunities around AIOps by leveraging the following Info-Tech resources:

GET STARTED WITH AIOps

Follow Info-Tech’s methodology to create a plan to deploy AI capabilities to improve operations management:

• Align organizational and IT automation goals.
• Develop use cases and define tool selection criteria.
• Prioritize which areas of operations management would benefit most from AI-based technology.

EXPLORE THE VENDOR SPACE

Explore the AIOps category on SoftwareReviews for tools offering the following features:

• Activity Data Analysis
• Discovery Data Analysis
• Machine Learning
• Data Visualization
• Explainable and Trainable Algorithms
• Event & Alert Management Automation
• Incident Management Automation
• Problem Management Automation
• Change Control Automation
• Performance & Capacity Management Automation
• Security Operations Automation
• Operational Task Automation

• FEATURED RESEARCH:
  Deploy AIOps to Improve IT Operations
• FEATURED RESEARCH:
  Kick-Start IT-Led Business Innovation
• SOFTWAREREVIEWS:
  AIOps Platforms

PRIORITY 02

DEVELOP A RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT STRATEGY

Set I&O up for continuous improvement by improving the ability to set and meet expectations and to collect, provide, and apply feedback with both the organization and vendors.

• Stakeholder Alignment & Management
• Vendor Performance Management

02 Develop a relationship management strategy

Relationship management

I&O benefits from strong relationship management capabilities with both its internal and external stakeholders

The previous priority emphasized the need to move closer to the organization and become involved earlier in the solutioning process. Doing this not only requires technical capabilities but also communication and relationship-building abilities. It is a key part of Stakeholder Alignment & Management: managing the relationship between business and IT to ensure expectations are aligned and stakeholders are satisfied with IT outcomes. How effective is I&O at this kind of relationship management?

Similarly, how effective is I&O at managing its external relationships? Vendor Performance Management is the ability to measure, monitor, improve, and report on vendor performance and relationship health to ensure successful project and contract outcomes. Good vendor performance management should help identify vendor issues, reduce or contain costs, drive continuous improvement and innovation, and help achieve organizational objectives. When vendors introduce changes, whether to their licensing model or to their roadmaps, does I&O know how to respond?

I&O needs to develop a relationship management strategy that sets them up for continuous improvement to better navigate vendor impacts:

• Set and meet expectations with stakeholders and vendors.
• Collect and apply feedback from the organization.
• Define how to navigate the vendor relationship, including the vendor roadmap and changes introduced by the vendor that impact the relationship.
• Establish the communication channels needed to enable the above.