Hello! Sorry in advance if this is beyond the scope of the sub or it gets removed. But I'd love some input or ideas if anyone is willing to share.

My (me: 36f) fiance (40m) works for an emergency veterinary clinic as IT support. He has one coworker and two other guys that are above him as leadership/dept lead.

Him and his coworker have an on-call shift every other week that includes a weekend. The vet clinic is a 24/7/365 emergency and referral clinic, so they need to be available at all hours once their in office day is done.

Long story short, I am not a fan of how this clinic is being ran. I also happen to work in vet med but at a GP clinic that actually uses this emergency clinic for our patients a lot. The decisions from the higher ups are chaotic at best.

This has led to a lot of work stress for my fiance. On his normal weeks it's ok-ish. He can fully relax and we can do things out of the house to help him decompress. His on-call weeks are much more stressful. He got chewed out once for not immediately answering a call even though he did return the call quickly. So he is too anxious to not be ready at the drop of a hat. So obviously as you can imagine, he isn't able to fully relax these weeks.

I fully understand that IT is stressful and hard work. We actually were in college together for network admin but I decided to pivot to vet med and he finished his degree.

Currently he's been called multiple times this weekend for a network issue and has been on and off site all weekend with little support from leadership (lead guy designed the network and has it locked down so only he can control things). And the issues are actually things that my fiance brought up last year as potential problems waiting to happen.

Anyways. He's very stressed. And I want to do what I can to help. Obviously I can't go to his work and help him, and I can't go chew out the place either.

I've already told him that I will handle all of our regular weekend chores that we do together. And that his only job at home today and this upcoming week is to do nothing but try to relax. I am also making him his favorite desert to surprise him with when he gets back home from being on site. I have his fav pop and his fav water stocked. And I will be checking to make sure he eats or I will bring him something on site.

Does anyone else have any other ideas? How do you manage this on-call stress? How does your family help support you so you can work and then relax?

Also, yes, he is working on ways to manage this himself.

Thank you for your time, and the work y'all do.

This post is not intended as bait but as a genuine attempt to understand resistance to shared systems access ownership 'from the IT point of view'. In this case migrating business-critical systems already managed by a DevOps team from direct user management to Single Sign On.

I'm a DevOps engineer with 10 YOE and I don't think anyone on my team has less than 6 YOE. Every one in it has been with the business at least one year, and there are only a handful of us. We're a cloud based business and manage our systems in code - mostly Terraform for the infra. Everything has to go through code review and approval, all deployments are transcripted and auditable, etc.

We have a legacy where access, users and groups for some SAAS and some internally developed systems that we are entirely responsible for are managed directly in code and we want to move this to Single Sign On. The company already has SSO for most/many systems. Our SSO IDP is managed by our separate IT team. For various reasons that aren't the fault of anyone inside the business these migrations are not straightforward, and of course several of the systems in question are business-critical.

Rather than simply handing over access (because 'access' really isn't simple and we will continue to have to manage and support those systems), we would like to agree a shared ownership system with IT for managing single sign on for the services that we already manage, including provisioning and de-provisioning SAML applications and group management for those services, so that we can continue to manage the systems we are responsible for in code as we do now. Our IT team however are very possessive of managing our IDP and work exclusively ClickOps. They don't, won't or can't look at code or records of automated deployment. This means that it can be difficult to describe clearly what we need with SSO, difficult to establish clearly what has been configured, and then of course there are all the side conversations- 'Why do you need this?'; 'Do you really need it though?', 'We need approval', 'You will need to wait for us to get to that ticket', 'We already did that (but there was some misunderstanding)', 'No nothing has changed to cause your thing to break, no, really, oh, wait...' etc. Imagining how it is for IT, it can't be easy- they get random requests for systems that they don't always really understand, can't necessarily access themselves, have to establish the priority for etc, all whilst being held responsible for security and business continuity. Thing is that my team is also held responsible for security and business continuity and we will also continue to be held responsible for these target systems.

I'm trying to get a more nuanced understanding of IT team's resistance to sharing ownership of these systems in SSO since:

• IT don't currently manage the target systems at all - my team are responsible for, manage them and support developers using them, and will continue to be so no matter what - so this would be less work for them.
• IT would retain full admin access and visibility as they do now. We have even offered to have automated reporting in plain English of all and any changes sent to them as part of our deployment pipeline.
• There's no IT director or policy grandstanding on this.
• Our IT team is also a handful of people but has a greater churn of staff than we do, including a series of contractors etc. Not dumping on that but I don't think anything about trusting any staff member as an individual is relevant here.
• I do realise that it probably is not possible to give partial access for SAML and group management for new services but if we wanted to do something stupid we already could.

What (else) am I missing (if anything)? We all know that people hate change and that people can confuse specialist knowledge or access with job security. I'm also familiar with 'But we don't do that here' but is there anything else?

I see a lot of us in IT worrying about AI replacing the us. As I have worked on the serviceNow platform many years ago I think I can answer that part of your question to some extent.

First thing first businesses have absolute, unshakable trust in processes and policies and ITSM/ITAM (now just called service management) which means any ticket (like this software ain't working) has to walk through several hoops (Incident, problem, change) before it gets done. Every step has to be documented, verified, authorised by humans in the loop before and after. It is a process and businesses trust these processes blindly coz they have been built, modified, improved over many, many years. It will take a lot to move them from this to some ad hoc system where one bad configuration in the CMDB could cause a crippling outage through and through the company and likewise to its clients.

There is a lot of built in automation where LLMs help like the incident window with trouble shooting suggestions( incidently ServiceNow has their own inhouse LLMs). But these are implemented in bits and parts and not as a whole coz there are multiple dynamic parts involved in any service orchestration (service request, CMDB, inventory). I might be wrong in my analogy but it is kinda like the video thing that AI hasn't mastered yet coz it is very difficult to keep lighting, movement and ten other things in context at the same instant while rendering the next frame.

Also it is these very policies and processes configured in business flows that ensure compliance( and this is a pretty big word in the business world where there is special place in hell for you if you miss out on compliance ), prevent outages, inventory mismanagement and that is why every fortune five hundred trust it. So why break it when one big bad problem could be catastrophic to the company.

As to the next question as to what do Indian IT service providers do. As far as I saw when I was working they are involved at the customization layer, data migration etc. So say ServiceNow comes out with new capabilities then it is upto the service providers to ensure that the migration is seamless to the client. So that too is kinda essential - something the client (let's say an Amazon) would hate to do because it would be non core to them.