IT Operations Management

In business, the term ‘Operations Management’ is used to mean the department, group or team of people responsible for performing the organization’s day-to-day operational activities – such as running the production line in a manufacturing environment or managing the distribution centres and fleet movements within a logistics organization.

Operations Management generally has the following characteristics:

• There is work to ensure that a device, system or process is actually running or working (as opposed to strategy or planning)
• This is where plans are turned into actions
• The focus is on daily or shorter-term activities, although it should be noted that these activities will generally be performed and repeated over a relatively long period (as opposed to one-off project type activities)
• These activities are executed by specialized technical staff, who often have to undergo technical training to learn how to perform each activity
• There is a focus on building repeatable, consistent actions that – if repeated frequently enough at the right level of quality – will ensure the success of the operation
• This is where the actual value of the organization is delivered and measured
• There is a dependency on investment in equipment or human resources or both
• The value generated, must exceed the cost of the investment and all other organizational overheads (such as management and marketing costs) if the business is to succeed.

In a similar way, IT Operations Management can be defined as the function responsible for the ongoing management and maintenance of an organization’s IT Infrastructure to ensure delivery of the agreed level of IT services to the business.

IT Operations can be defined as the set of activities involved in the day-to-day running of the IT Infrastructure for the purpose of delivering IT services at agreed levels to meet stated business objectives.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 984