Most IT teams don't need more tools. They need less friction.

I've spent enough time inside IT service environments to notice a pattern. When something breaks, or when a team can't scale, the instinct is always the same: add a new tool. A better monitoring platform. Another dashboard. One more integration that promises to tie everything together.

The problem isn't the tooling. The problem is the ten small manual steps nobody has bothered to question.

What operational friction actually looks like

Here's a picture of a normal week for a lot of IT teams:

Logging into three or four vendor portals just to check device status. Pulling contract expiry dates from a spreadsheet that was last updated sometime in Q3. Copying data between systems because nothing talks to anything else. Rebuilding the same review deck every month from scratch. Someone asking "is it online?" and someone else having to go and actually check.

None of these are glamorous problems. None of them show up in a product roadmap. But they eat time in chunks that compound over weeks and months. A five-minute check here, a manual data pull there - and suddenly your engineers are spending a meaningful chunk of their week on things a script could handle.

I'm not talking about edge cases. This is standard operating procedure at most IT teams I've worked with.

The 4 layers of IT friction

When I try to break this down, I keep coming back to four categories. They show up in every environment.

1. Visibility friction. You can't see what's happening without going somewhere to look. Status lives in a portal, not in front of you. The first step in any troubleshooting workflow is a login.

2. Access friction. The right information exists, but getting to it requires credentials, context switches, and clicking through interfaces that weren't built with speed in mind. The tool exists; the path to it is broken.

3. Context switching. IT work is interrupt-driven by nature. But when every interruption requires opening a different system, reading a different interface, and interpreting a different data format, cognitive cost stacks up fast. People make worse decisions when they're constantly switching.

4. Repetition. This is the most expensive one, and the most ignored. The monthly contract review. The weekly device health check. The report that gets rebuilt the same way every time. Nobody has said "this should be automated" - not because it can't be, but because it's never been prioritised.

The highest ROI work in IT right now isn't AI copilots

I'll say something that might not be popular: most teams would get more value from eliminating their top five manual repeatable tasks than from any AI product they could buy this year.

That's not a knock on AI tools. It's a statement about priorities. The compounding value of removing a daily friction point is real and measurable. A new copilot that nobody uses consistently is not.

The highest return on effort work in IT right now is the boring stuff. Identifying which manual steps happen most often, and killing them one by one.

Before you buy anything else

Before buying another monitoring tool, ask one question: what manual step can we eliminate this week?

Not this quarter. This week.

I've been building small Azure-based internal tools to do exactly this - not because they're impressive, but because the impact compounds. An automated contract expiry alert. A single-pane view for device status. A report that writes itself.

None of it is flashy. All of it saves real time.

The teams I've seen handle operational scale well aren't the ones with the most tooling. They're the ones that quietly removed the friction that was slowing everyone else down.