At my last company we had exactly these problems with a central IT service. In the end we got so frustrated with the poor service that we moved to using a 3rd p

At my last company we had exactly these problems with a central IT service. In the end we got so frustrated with the poor service that we moved to using a 3rd party for hosting and admin. We never looked back. We didn't have a ticketing system, we spoke to them directly in irc. They also took the attitude that any request that might be repeated was automated so that we would either not have to bother in the future or we could easily do it ourselves. Generally this automation was put in place at the time of the request. It should be noted that we did have full access to the production environments and that we did our own QA. We found that by using a strict process we were able to keep quality very high; in the two years that we had this setup I can't recall a single occasion where we experienced a service failure. Of course there were bugs etc. but we were extremely happy with the low incidence rate of these. On another note, I'm now in one of those startups without any sysadmins. We use heroku with a handful of addons. This setup has quite frankly blown me away. You can have the best of everything, monitoring, backups, cron jobs, error tracking, memcached servers etc. with no admin required beyond switching the services on. Having used such a setup I see the requirement for sysadmins being far diminished.