IT Operations (Information Technology Operations)

Information Technology Operations, or IT operations, are the set of all processes and services
that are both provisioned by an IT staff to their internal or external clients and used by themselves,
to run themselves as a business. The term refers to the application of operations management to a
business's technology needs (/wiki/IT_Strategy_(Information_Technology_Strategy)). Operations
work can include responding to tickets generated for maintenance work or customer issues. Some
operations teams rely on on-call responses to incidents during off-hours periods [1]

Gartner defines IT Operations as "the people and management processes

(/wiki/Business_Process) associated with IT service management
(/wiki/IT_Service_Management_(ITSM)) to deliver the right set of services at the right quality and
at competitive costs for customers."[2]

IT Strategy (/wiki/IT_Strategy_(Information_Technology_Strategy)) identifies the demand - which

products and services to build, when, and in which quantity - while IT Operations determines the
supply - builds and deploys the products and services - in collaboration with IT Sourcing
(/wiki/IT_Sourcing_(Information_Technology_Sourcing)) which determines what to build, what to
buy and from whom.

Every organization that uses computers has at least loosely-defined IT operations, based on how it
tends to solve internal and client needs. Elements of IT operations are chosen to deliver effective
services at the required quality and cost. IT operations are usually considered to be separate from
IT applications (/wiki/Business_Application). In a software development company, for example, IT
operations include all IT functions other than software development and management. However,
there is always some overlap between the departments. IT operations determine the way an
organization manages software and hardware and includes other IT support, such as network
administration, device management, mobile contracting and help desks of all kinds. IT operations
management (ITOM) (/wiki/IT_Operations_Management_(ITOM)) and IT operations analytics
(ITOA) (/wiki/IT_Operations_Analytics_(ITOA)) help an organization refine the way that IT
approaches services, deployment and support and help to ensure consistency, reliability and
quality of service. Current IT trends affecting IT operations include cloud computing
(/wiki/Cloud_Computing), machine-to-machine (M2M) (/wiki/Machine-to-Machine_(M2M))
communications and the Internet of Things (IoT) (/wiki/Internet_of_Things_(IoT)). The efficiency of
cloud computing typically means that IT operations for a given organization require fewer
administrators. The increasing interconnectivity and automation of M2M and IoT require
adaptations to the traditional IT operations skill sets and business processes. Different
organizations define IT operations in various ways; the term is also used to describe the
department that manages IT operations as well as the collection of services and processes and
how the department operates as a standardized procedure.[3]
 Joe Hertvik defines IT Operations as being "responsible for the smooth functioning of the
infrastructure and operational environments that support application deployment to internal
and external customers, including the network infrastructure; server and device management;
computer operations; IT infrastructure library (ITIL) management; and help desk services for
an organization."
IT operations is generally viewed as a separate department from software development. It can
include "network administration, device management, mobile contracting and help desks of all
kinds."
Ernest Mueller defines IT operations as "a blanket term for systems engineers, system
administrators, operations staff, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers, security
professionals, and various other subdisciplines and job titles."[4]

Contents
1 The IT Operations Process
2 IT Operations Tasks
3 IT Operations Success Factors

3.1 See Also

3.2 References
3.3 Further Reading

The IT Operations Process

[5]

Some methods will choose to prescribe a single approach, such as capturing architectural
requirements in the form of epics or pre-building “architectural runways,” but the Disciplined Agile
framework promotes an adaptive, context-sensitive strategy. DA does this via its goal-driven
approach that indicates the decision points that you need to consider, a range of techniques or
strategies for you to address each decision point, and the advantages and disadvantages of each
technique. In this section we present the goal diagram for the IT Operations process blade and
overviews its decision points. Figure 1 overviews the potential activities associated with Disciplined
Agile IT Operations.
 (/wiki/File:IT_Operations.jpg)

Figure 1. source: Disciplined Agile Consortium (http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/agility-at-s

cale/it-operations/#Process)

The decision points that need to be considered for IT Operations are:

Run solutions. The reason why your IT operations efforts exist is to run your organization’s
solutions in production.
Manage infrastructure. Your IT ecosystem is made up of the solutions that you build and buy
as well as the infrastructure (hardware, software, network, cloud, and so on) that those
solutions run on. This infrastructure must be managed (and evolved).
Manage configurations. You need to understand the configuration of your IT ecosystem,
including dependencies between various aspects of it, to support impact analysis of any
potential changes. Traditional strategies are centered around manual maintenance of
configuration and dependency metadata, a risky and expensive proposition at best. Agile
strategies focus on deriving/generating the required metadata from development tools,
particularly from agile management tools such as VersionOne or the Atlassian Suite -or- from
executable test specifications.
Evolve infrastructure. You will evolve your IT infrastructure over time, upgrading databases,
operating systems, hardware components, network components, and many more. Due to the
significant coupling of your solutions to your infrastructure, and infrastructure components to
other aspects of your infrastructure, this can be a risky endeavor (hence the need to identify
the potential impact of any change before making it).
Mitigate disasters. Disciplined organizations will plan for operational disasters. Potential
disasters include servers going down, network connectivity going down, power outages, failed
solution deployments, failed infrastructure deployments, natural disasters such as fires and
floods, terrorist attacks, and many more. Furthermore, it is one thing to have disaster
mitigations plans in place, it is another to know whether they actually work. Disciplined
organizations will run through disaster scenarios to verify how well their mitigation strategies
work in practice. This can be done on a scheduled basis at first, evolving into unscheduled or
 “random” problems (via something like ChaosMonkey) and eventually even full-fledged
disaster scenarios.
Govern IT operations. As with other process blades, the activities of IT Operations must be
governed effectively. Operational governance is part of your organization’s overall IT
Governance and Control efforts.

IT Operations Tasks
[6]

In general, the rest of IT Operations tasks fall into three areas: Computer Operations & Help Desk;
Network Infrastructure; and Server and Device Management. So here’s what the Venn Diagram
(/wiki/Venn_Diagram) (Figure 2.) looks like, when we break down IT Operations into these areas.

(/wiki/File:IT_Operations1.jpg)

Figure 2. source: Joe Hertvik (http://joehertvik.com/operations-management/)

The following is a list of what IT Operations deals with that fall into these three sub-areas.

Network Infrastructure

Infrastructure: All networking functions for internal and external IT communications

(router, hubs, firewalls, DNS servers, file servers, load balancing, etc.)
Telecommunications: Managing and configuring all internal and external communication
lines so that customers, employees, vendors, and other interested parties can access
applications.
Port management: Opening and closing ports on the firewall to allow the network to
communicate with outside servers.
Security: Insuring the network is secured only to authorized users and to prevent/counter
attacks from outside sources
 Remote access to the network for users: Setting up access from outside the network
using techniques such as VPN, two-factor authentication, etc.
Internal telephone system management: Managing the company phone system
Monitoring network health and alerting network personnel when an issue occurs with
network resources (including storage, services such as email or file servers, application
servers, communications, etc.)

Server & Device Management

Server management for applications and infrastructure: Set up configuration,

maintenance, upgrades, patching, repair, etc.
Network and individual storage management to insure that all applications have access to
the storage requirements they need for disk, memory, backup, and archiving
Email and file server configuration and folder setup and authorization: This is classified as
a separate area because outside of order taking & fulfillment and customer service, email
and file server management are two of the most important IT functions in a company
PC provisioning: Acquisition, configuration, management, break/fix, applications
installation & configuration, upgrades of company approved desktop and laptop devices
Mobile device and cell phone telecommunications management: Provisioning, assigning,
managing, cell phone contracts, and phone numbers. Provisioning for mobile device
approved by the organization. Providing for BYOD access to the network.
Desktop, laptop, and mobile device software application licensing and management

Computer Operations & Help Desk

Data Center management: Management of the physical locations where the equipment
resides, including floor space, electricity, cooling, battery backups, etc.
Help Desk management: Level 1 support for IT Operations with responsibility for
escalating issues to and following up on issues with Level 2 and Level 3 support.
User provisioning: Creation and authorization of user profiles on all systems. Also
includes changes to user profiles and the procedure for deleting old user profiles
Auditing: Proving to outside entities (corporate auditors, the government, regulatory
agencies, business partners, etc) that your network is correctly configured and secured
Communications with network users when a major incident occurs impacting network
services
High availability and disaster recovery: Providing capabilities to insure your application
servers and network can function in the event of a disaster
Backups management: Instituting and running daily, weekly, monthly, yearly backups to
insure data can be recovered, if needed
Computer operations: Printing and distributing reports, invoices, checks, other outputs
from a production systems, such as an IBM i
Maintain, manage, and add to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) for the organization

Items All Areas are responsible for

 Vendor and contract management – Responsible for working with vendors, negotiations, and
paying bills for all hardware, software, and services employed by the network and its
applications
Outside contractor management – Working with outside resources that provide services for
the network
Break/fix and repairing problems that occur
Project management and deployment – Deploying improvements and fixes to the network and
applications infrastructure

IT Operations Success Factors

[7]

Successful Operations efforts balance several competing factors:

Strategic (long term) versus tactical (short term). There is a fine balance between ensuring
operational safety while enabling the evolution of operational systems.
Operations needs versus organizational needs. You want to not only optimize the flow of
operational work but do so within the context of your larger organization – Context Counts.
Standardization versus evolution. To reduce the overall cost and risk associated with
operations, and to simultaneously make it easier for development teams to test and release
changes into production, you want to standardize as much of your IT infrastructure as
possible. Yet your infrastructure cannot be allowed to stagnate, it must safely evolve over time
– Hence the need to work with your Enterprise Architecture efforts to envision the future and
run experiments so as to learn how to evolve towards that vision.
Team DevOps versus organizational efficiency. The DevOps philosophy of “you build it, you
run it” is very attractive to individual delivery teams, and it certainly makes sense for smaller
organizations. But for organizations with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of delivery
teams working in parallel your costs and risks quickly skyrocket. These organizations quickly
realize that having a flexible operations/infrastructure team to support the delivery teams to
leverage common infrastructure and guidance will help to optimize the overall workflow across
your DAE – Follow the Pragmatism principle.

See Also
Information Technology Asset Management (ITAM)
(/wiki/Information_Technology_Asset_Management_(ITAM))
IT Operations Management (ITOM) (/wiki/IT_Operations_Management_(ITOM))
IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) (/wiki/IT_Operations_Analytics_(ITOA))
IT Governance (/wiki/IT_Governance)
IT Transformation (/wiki/IT_Transformation)
Information System (IS) (/wiki/Information_System_(IS))
Information Technology (IT) (/wiki/Information_Technology_(IT))
IT Ecosystem (/wiki/IT_Ecosystem)
Business Strategy (/wiki/Business_Strategy)
IT Strategy (/wiki/IT_Strategy_(Information_Technology_Strategy))
e-Strategy (/wiki/E-Strategy)
IT Governance (/wiki/IT_Governance)
Enterprise Architecture (/wiki/Enterprise_Architecture)
IT Sourcing (/wiki/IT_Sourcing_(Information_Technology_Sourcing))
CIO (/wiki/Chief_Information_Officer_(CIO))
ITIL (/wiki/ITIL_(Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library))

References
1. What is IT Operations (Information Technology Operations) Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Data_center_management#Data_center_asset_management)
2. Defining IT Operations (Information Technology Operations) Gartner (https://www.gartner.com/i
t-glossary/it-operations/)
3. What is IT Operations (Information Technology Operations)? Techtarget (https://searchitoperati
ons.techtarget.com/definition/IT-operations)
4. Various Definitions of IT Operations Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technol
ogy_operations)
5. Explaining the IT Operations Process DAD (http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/agility-at-sc
ale/it-operations/#Process)
6. What are the Tasks that fall under the purview of IT Operations Joe Hertvik (http://joehertvik.co
m/operations-management/)
7. IT Operations Success Factors Disciplined Agile Delivery (http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.c
om/agility-at-scale/it-operations/#Process)

Further Reading
What does the future of IT Operations look like (in a #DevOps world)? DevOps Group (https://
www.devopsgroup.com/2015/06/30/what-does-the-future-of-it-operations-look-like-in-a-devop
s-world/)
DevOps and IT Operations OpenCredo (https://opencredo.com/devops-and-it-operations/)
The Impact of Automation on IT Operations Fujitsu (https://www.fujitsu.com/si/Images/user_su
rvey_report_The_Impact_of_Automation_on_IT_Operations_ww_en.pdf)
Evolve your IT operations team for cloud success Tom Nolle (https://searchcloudcomputing.te
chtarget.com/tip/Evolving-IT-operations-teams-for-cloud-success)
IT Operations Analytics: The driving factors that are making it 'spread like wildfire' Tech
Republic (https://www.techrepublic.com/article/it-operations-analytics-the-driving-factors-that-a
 re-making-it-spread-like-wildfire/)

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