I think you are right. Where I’ve seen success in “the boring middle” is when an appropriate amount of tension exists in the engineering organization: you want some teams and groups pushing to try new things, but they need to push against a boundary - preferably something, not someone - and the boundary should define your organization’s best practices and standards. This way a team doesn’t get to sneak clustered Mongo into the cloud and make your ordering systems talk to it.

But over time boring IT turns into legacy, and without some tension to the system pushing it forward your standards end up locking you into legacy forever.