At its core, traditional IT Operations is overwhelmingly reactive - humans respond to incidents and tickets. There is so much noise! Alerts, tickets, audits, chat threads and more. What if ops could catch the small things before they turn into big problems? What if your ops team built tools that allowed them to be proactive?
A Proactive Ops team is an IT Ops team engaged in software engineering. There will still be tickets and alerts for the team to deal with, but there should be fewer issues fighting for the team's attention. With most routine issues resolved by scripts, only the tickets that remain need a human to resolve.
Many organisations have embraced some version of the DevOps culture of shared ownership. Some teams took this too far - where all developers have full access to all systems and so everything is always on fire. In other organisations, DevOps became a job title for a sys admin who builds out and deploys to cloud environments. Then there is the enterprise; In this space Ops is often outsourced. Rather than focusing on needs and outcomes, engineers narrowly follow documented processes.