The traditional IT model was built to close tickets. Most venture-backed companies have a SaaS sprawl problem they have not fully mapped, a ghost access problem they do not know they have, and an IT operating model that was designed to close tickets, not prevent them.

Casey Carlton, Head of Technology Operations at Treeline, has spent a decade building IT orgs at high-growth startups. At one company, he found over 400 active SaaS applications across fewer than 300 employees. Former employees still had admin-level access to Salesforce, AWS, and financial systems months after departure. A CFO nearly cut one of the most-used tools in the stack because nobody had ever shown her the usage data.

In this piece, originally published in Forbes Technology Council, Casey walks through what fixing IT actually looks like. Automated offboarding triggered directly from your HRIS. Onboarding cut from multiple days to under an hour. A SaaS audit that took one company from 400 applications to under 80, with named owners, usage baselines, and automated renewal workflows.

The cost savings covered the entire IT function for the year. For the first time, the executive team had real-time visibility into what their technology stack was doing and what it was costing them.

The companies that get this right stop talking about IT as a function. They talk about it the way they talk about Product: as something that compounds. Here's the bigger picture that Casey is helping bring to life.

Read the full piece on Forbes Technology Council.

Treeline was built for exactly this. See how it works.

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