There were sysadmins doing automation before people invented DevOps, and they had similar challenges: finding time for "projects" in between fixing the printer.

There were sysadmins doing automation before people invented DevOps, and they had similar challenges: finding time for "projects" in between fixing the printer. A good book on this is Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli. It's short and humorous and might give you some ideas. I don't think you're going to change the organization, but you might be able to improve things here and there and get more personal satisfaction from your work. Maybe also find out who wrote that job description. Perhaps you can make a case that you were given a mandate to push the organization toward better practices. But in that case perhaps you should also ask for a promotion, because it doesn't sound like you have the authority to make the changes you'd like.