IT service was built to bring structure to chaos. But for many organizations today, it’s become a source of it. The ticket queues keep growing. Processes feel rigid. And employees often feel frustrated by systems that seem stuck a decade behind.
The numbers reflect this pain, with 40% of organizations either replacing or re-implementing their IT service tools in 2025. This is a clear sign that the model is cracking and needs to be reimagined. Meanwhile, 58% of organizations say their IT team spends more than five hours each week fulfilling repetitive requests. Something has to give.
Today’s businesses are agile. Customers expect instant fixes, and artificial intelligence (AI) is redefining how work gets done. The problem? Many IT processes haven’t kept up. They’re still burdened by manual, outdated workflows that slow everyone down, with a recent report citing that 45% of organizations consider repetitive tasks as their top IT service challenge in 2025. To stay relevant, IT must evolve from a back-office function into a strategic driver of business growth.
Here are the three biggest challenges holding IT service back and how forward-thinking teams can help solve them:
1. The manual workload trap
For most IT teams, the day begins and ends with manual tasks: logging incidents, assigning tickets, documenting fixes, and updating records. These repetitive processes drain time and productivity. In fact, 90% of IT leaders say manual, repetitive work contributes to low employee morale.
The impact runs deep. Skilled analysts are pulled away from strategic work. Projects stall. Employee burnout rises. And IT ends up perceived as a cost center, not an enabler.
The fix starts with automation, but not just rule-based automation. The next generation of IT service is built on intelligence, context-aware systems that can actually understand what someone needs. For example, when an employee messages IT about a problem, the system can pick up the key details, create a ticket, and send it to the right person automatically. Instead of humans chasing data, the system does it for them.
This shift doesn’t replace people; it refocuses them. Analysts can now spend time on important work like diagnosing complex issues or improving processes, not copy-pasting tickets.
2. The employee experience gap
The modern workplace runs on collaboration platforms like Slack and Teams. Yet most IT service tools still live outside of where people actually work. Employees have to leave their workflow, open a portal, fill out forms, and wait. Often, they do this without any visibility into what happens next.
The result? Low engagement. In many companies, a large number of IT issues go unreported because the process feels too painful. In fact, 62% of employees say they avoid their service desk altogether, and 58% admit they’re living with ongoing problems that IT hasn’t been able to fix, according to a recent survey.
IT analysts feel this friction, too. The conversations that matter (troubleshooting, context gathering, updates) happen in chat threads, while the official records live in a different system. That constant switching between tabs slows everything down.
Modern IT leaders are closing this gap by bringing IT service into the collaboration layer. When employees can request help and track issues directly in the places where they collaborate and work, like Slack or Teams, context stays intact and work keeps moving. With AI agents now built into these platforms, they can simply ask for what they need in natural language, just like chatting with a colleague or a ChatGPT-style interface. The result: IT becomes an active part of daily work, not a separate system to avoid.
It’s a cultural shift as much as a technical one, aligning IT with how employees actually communicate. And it pays off: 71% IT leaders believe that AI or intelligent automation will improve employee and customer satisfaction in IT service.
3. Rigid processes in a dynamic world
If there’s one phrase that frustrates every IT leader, it’s this: “This is just how the system works.”
Traditional IT service frameworks often lock teams into fixed workflows. Need to adjust an approval process for a new compliance rule? Add a custom step for a high-priority change type? Often, it takes weeks of development or costly consultants to make even minor updates.
The irony is that IT service, meant to bring flexibility to operations, has become one of the least agile systems in the enterprise stack.
What’s changing now is the rise of low-code and adaptive workflows. Platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and other modern ITSM tools let teams design and modify processes without deep coding expertise. Instead of rigid, hard-coded systems, IT can define dynamic lifecycles where each stage has its own rules, tasks, and access controls. Approvals can adapt automatically based on risk or impact. And integrated analytics help teams see what’s working and where bottlenecks form.
Rethinking IT service for what’s next
The IT service of the future won’t just manage incidents and changes. It will orchestrate intelligent workflows across the enterprise. Employees will interact with IT the same way they use any modern app — conversationally, contextually, and instantly. IT teams will focus less on maintaining systems and more on improving outcomes.
We’re already seeing the blueprint: automation reducing manual load, Slack-first collaboration improving experiences, and flexible frameworks enabling adaptation. Together, these shifts are redefining what IT service can be, turning it from a support function into a strategic partner for every department.
The challenge isn’t technology anymore. It’s the mindset. Modern IT service isn’t about keeping the lights on. It’s about lighting the way forward.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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