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Gartner: Infrastructure & Operations Must Shift Focus from Efficiency to Adaptive Resilience

In a world where constant change is becoming routine, Gartner said that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must shift their traditional focus from efficiency to one of adaptive resilience.

"I&O leaders must re-imagine how they manage their talent, their platforms and operations, if they want to dynamically and quickly exploit new opportunities," said Dennis Smith, Research VP at Gartner.

I&O Leaders Must Retain, Attract and Evolve Talent

In a world where being adaptable is paramount, talent management plays a more critical role than ever for I&O organizations. A Gartner survey showed that talent availability is the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies. This dynamic — combined with a fiercely competitive labor market — are putting more pressure than ever on I&O leaders.

I&O leaders must learn how to retain the talent they have, attract new talent, and evolve everyone's skills along the way. By embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion's best practices, organizations can build the right resources over time and use agile learning methods to adapt and evolve skillsets as needed.

Gartner analysts predict that by 2026, 50% of large organizations will use agile learning as the upskilling/reskilling method.

I&O Leaders Must Build Adaptive Platforms

"With over 40% of organizations' staff now acting as business technologists, we have a wider variety of users depending on IT departments today than ever before," said Douglas Toombs, Research VP at Gartner. "The rapid growth of "citizen IT" business technologists, paired with the vast array of public and private infrastructure choices available in the market, has placed more pressure on I&O to perform than ever before."

By building adaptive platforms that are loosely coupled, but tightly integrated, I&O can empower creators of all types of systems throughout the organization.

"As hyperautomation is a critical path to achieve growth and operational excellence, I&O leaders must make automation a first-class discipline in everything they do," said Toombs.

By embracing hyperautomation strategies, I&O can pave the way for intelligence systems, such as AIOps and incident response automation, that play a key role in the day-to-day operations of IT.

Gartner estimates that by 2025, 60% of I&O teams will use AI-augmented automation across their organizations, up from 1% in 2020.

I&O Leaders Must Co-Create with the Business

"No matter how good your technologies or solutions are, no matter how talented your staff is, I&O leaders must align I&O with the way the business works to continuously adapt in a world of constant change," said Julia Palmer, Research VP at Gartner. "I&O leaders will have to learn to work towards adaptive operations to focus on multiple business models, and rethink how I&O engages and partners with the business."

I&O leaders must help their organization grow adaptively by sensing and responding to business changes. Embedding I&O closer to the business with the use of fusion teaming will enable leaders to quickly adjust plans, forecasts, budgets, and resources as business environments change.

"This is not about growing I&O. It is about I&O enabling the growth of the business," Palmer concluded.

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Gartner: Infrastructure & Operations Must Shift Focus from Efficiency to Adaptive Resilience

In a world where constant change is becoming routine, Gartner said that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must shift their traditional focus from efficiency to one of adaptive resilience.

"I&O leaders must re-imagine how they manage their talent, their platforms and operations, if they want to dynamically and quickly exploit new opportunities," said Dennis Smith, Research VP at Gartner.

I&O Leaders Must Retain, Attract and Evolve Talent

In a world where being adaptable is paramount, talent management plays a more critical role than ever for I&O organizations. A Gartner survey showed that talent availability is the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies. This dynamic — combined with a fiercely competitive labor market — are putting more pressure than ever on I&O leaders.

I&O leaders must learn how to retain the talent they have, attract new talent, and evolve everyone's skills along the way. By embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion's best practices, organizations can build the right resources over time and use agile learning methods to adapt and evolve skillsets as needed.

Gartner analysts predict that by 2026, 50% of large organizations will use agile learning as the upskilling/reskilling method.

I&O Leaders Must Build Adaptive Platforms

"With over 40% of organizations' staff now acting as business technologists, we have a wider variety of users depending on IT departments today than ever before," said Douglas Toombs, Research VP at Gartner. "The rapid growth of "citizen IT" business technologists, paired with the vast array of public and private infrastructure choices available in the market, has placed more pressure on I&O to perform than ever before."

By building adaptive platforms that are loosely coupled, but tightly integrated, I&O can empower creators of all types of systems throughout the organization.

"As hyperautomation is a critical path to achieve growth and operational excellence, I&O leaders must make automation a first-class discipline in everything they do," said Toombs.

By embracing hyperautomation strategies, I&O can pave the way for intelligence systems, such as AIOps and incident response automation, that play a key role in the day-to-day operations of IT.

Gartner estimates that by 2025, 60% of I&O teams will use AI-augmented automation across their organizations, up from 1% in 2020.

I&O Leaders Must Co-Create with the Business

"No matter how good your technologies or solutions are, no matter how talented your staff is, I&O leaders must align I&O with the way the business works to continuously adapt in a world of constant change," said Julia Palmer, Research VP at Gartner. "I&O leaders will have to learn to work towards adaptive operations to focus on multiple business models, and rethink how I&O engages and partners with the business."

I&O leaders must help their organization grow adaptively by sensing and responding to business changes. Embedding I&O closer to the business with the use of fusion teaming will enable leaders to quickly adjust plans, forecasts, budgets, and resources as business environments change.

"This is not about growing I&O. It is about I&O enabling the growth of the business," Palmer concluded.

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The gap is widening between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures, according to The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a report from Imply ...

Seamless shopping is a basic demand of today's boundaryless consumer — one with little patience for friction, limited tolerance for disconnected experiences and minimal hesitation in switching brands. Customers expect intuitive, highly personalized experiences and the ability to move effortlessly across physical and digital channels within the same journey. Failure to deliver can cost dearly ...

If your best engineers spend their days sorting tickets and resetting access, you are wasting talent. New global data shows that employees in the IT sector rank among the least motivated across industries. They're under a lot of pressure from many angles. Pressure to upskill and uncertainty around what agentic AI means for job security is creating anxiety. Meanwhile, these roles often function like an on-call job and require many repetitive tasks ...

In a 2026 survey conducted by Liquibase, the research found that 96.5% of organizations reported at least one AI or LLM interaction with their production databases, often through analytics and reporting, training pipelines, internal copilots, and AI generated SQL. Only a small fraction reported no interaction at all. That means the database is no longer a downstream system that AI "might" reach later. AI is already there ...

In many organizations, IT still operates as a reactive service provider. Systems are managed through fragmented tools, teams focus heavily on operational metrics, and business leaders often see IT as a necessary cost center rather than a strategic partner. Even well-run ITIL environments can struggle to bridge the gap between operational excellence and business impact. This is where the concept of ITIL+ comes in ...

UK IT leaders are reaching a critical inflection point in how they manage observability, according to research from LogicMonitor. As infrastructure complexity grows and AI adoption accelerates, fragmented monitoring environments are driving organizations to rethink their operational strategies and consolidate tools ...

For years, many infrastructure teams treated the edge as a deployment variation. It was seen as the same cloud model, only stretched outward: more devices, more gateways, more locations and a little more latency. That assumption is proving costly. The edge is not just another place to run workloads. It is a fundamentally different operating condition ...

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Ask where enterprise AI is making its most decisive impact, and the answer might surprise you: not marketing, not finance, not customer experience. It's IT. Across three years of industry research conducted by Digitate, one constant holds true is that IT is both the testing ground and the proving ground for enterprise AI. Last year, that position only strengthened ...