With over 14,000 active employees and nearly 15,000 user accounts at any given time, Identity and Access Management was a major challenge. Add in the fact that over 200 applications are used on a daily basis, from point of sales, to financials and human resource information systems, you’ve got yourself a seemingly impossible task to manage identities securely and efficiently.
The pager has defined on-call culture for 30 years. The next decade will make it a relic — but only for the teams that move first.
The pager was invented in 1921. The on-call rotation, in spirit, isn't much younger. For most of computing history, the assumption has been simple: when systems break, humans fix them. The goal was to make humans faster.
That assumption is cracking. Not because humans are being replaced — but because the category of problems that genuinely require human judgment is shrinking, and the tooling has finally caught up enough to act on that reality.
Here's where incident management is heading — and what separates the teams that get there first from those still managing a 2026 problem with 2010 tools.
On-call culture was shaped by a specific era of infrastructure: monolithic systems, limited observability, and failure modes that were genuinely novel each time. When a system broke, you needed an expert. The expert needed to be reachable. The pager solved that problem.
"The pager didn't fail. It solved exactly the problem it was designed for. The problem has changed — and the tooling finally has too."
The teams at the frontier of incident management share a common frame: they've stopped asking "how do we respond faster?" and started asking "which of these should ever require a response at all?"
That reframe has practical consequences. It means auditing incident history not for MTTR trends, but for the ratio of novel-to-known failures. It means treating every recurring incident as a process failure, not a systems failure. And it means investing in automation infrastructure the same way previous generations invested in monitoring infrastructure.
The results are measurable. Teams that have made this shift report 30–50% reductions in page volume within a quarter — and the pages that remain are higher-signal, higher-stakes, and genuinely worth a human's attention.
Three shifts are coming that will separate mature incident management from what most teams are still doing today.
The gap between early adopters and laggards in incident management tends to compound. Teams that automate their first incident class free up the engineering time needed to automate the next one. Teams that don't fall further behind with each quarter — not because their systems are worse, but because their best engineers are still waking at 3am for problems that solved themselves for someone else's team six months ago.
The talent dimension is underappreciated. Engineers who have experienced sustainable on-call don't go back. As early-adopter teams build reputations for humane rotations, they gain a structural recruiting advantage — one that compounds the operational gap further.
The future of incident management isn't about better pagers or faster humans. It's about systematically shrinking the set of problems that require human intervention at all — and ensuring that when humans do engage, they have the full-stack context to act decisively.
The question for engineering leaders this year isn't whether to invest in this direction. It's whether to start now, while the gap between early and late movers is still closeable — or later, when it isn't.
The first step toward a healthier on-call culture is a single conversation. Reach out to our team today and let's talk about what's possible for your organization. Contact the Arisant experts at 303-330-4065 or email us at polaris_monitoring@arisant.com
Polaris is a monitoring tool with self-healing capabilities that can augment or replace your current monitoring solution. Please reach out if you'd like additional information.
This analysis draws on industry research from Gartner, PagerDuty, and first-party incident data. Cost estimates reflect conservative projections for a mid-size technology organization operating with 10 on-call engineers.
