IT Operations Management (ITOM) is the IT area that effectively plans, organizes, coordinates, and controls IT resources. That is, it must effectively manage various attributes of the operation, such as people, equipment, information, applications, connectivity, technology, and others.

IT operations management is a vital component in an organization’s operation. And that’s why it’s so important to ensure that you have a robust operational management process in your IT. After all, good operational management offers a much more complete perspective on service consumption by other areas of the company, and on how resources are scaled and how they are supporting the success of the company. More than that, it is fundamental in identifying the areas that can be improved and promoting a continuous and healthy process within the company.

IT operations management defines how the area should approach services and support. That is, its main objective is to ensure the availability of services (the composition of various active element) when and where they are needed.

It is important to note that ITOM covers:

• Network and Connectivity Management
• Service Management
• Cloud Management
• Data Center
• Application Management
• Security Management (especially data)
• Business Continuity Management

Why is ITOM important to businesses?

IT operations management (ITOM) is of fundamental importance to companies because the growing need for IT services on-demand, high availability of systems and applications, and business changes lead to merging the IT operation with the operation of the company. What must be said is that without systems and applications, very few companies and organizations would survive today.

Availability is the new power. Services that can be made available through portals, mobile apps, apps or others need to be available wherever and whenever they are needed.

5 quick and efficient tips

To facilitate the process of implementing ITOM in your company, we have set here in this post 5 quick and efficient tips for you to use in your company:

Hardware and software discovery and inventory

It is essential to perform the process of discovering devices (servers, desktops, notebooks, network devices, among others) within your technology park. This discovery can be made by scanning software or manually, but the most important thing is to perform and maintain this control.

After discovering all devices, it is important to know which software is used and where it is distributed within the technology park. In this case, due to the complexity of IT parks today, it is a task that will probably be done by collection software.

Keep the CMDB up to date

After the discovery and inventory of hardware and software, it is necessary to keep the previous process continually running, always generating new entries in the list or indicating the output or possible output of elements (removal of software or hardware).

It is vital to establish relationships or connections between configuration items, that is, to exit an inventoried list for a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), it is necessary to establish the relationships between the items correctly, especially when they form value assets, that is, their compositions generate services for the company.

Step away from firefighting IT for active monitoring —drive event management

Once the CMDB is established, it is necessary to manage what happens with the various configuration items, clearly having their impacts on the services. And what each state (or alert) in a configuration item can represent for the availability of services.

The tip to establishing active and coherent monitoring is to focus on significant states or alerts, that is, signals that may represent that something is not going well and may generate a problem soon.

When you know what types of alerts can arrive and what can happen, establish action/response plans to run when something happens. These plans need to contain precise guidance as well as indicate sources of knowledge for operators who will have the mission to recover assets (or services) to their original state.

Event management is an important ally of IT operations, especially in the mission of proactively acting  and reducing downtime.

Promote automation

The automation of the operation that is, software that performs the firing of other software, controlling their responses and following an orchestrated execution flow, represents today an immense source of gains, because they can be used to create new environments, whether for DevOps cycles, or others, as well as for recovery of environments if event management needs to trigger automation.

All of the above irrespective of whether your infrastructure is internal, cloud, or hybrid—automation only brings gains because it removes human factors that could lead to inconsistencies in processes and bring greater agility.

Align ITOM with linked business strategies

It is essential to align operations management with linked business strategies or operations, i.e., to know clearly that certain technology services are supporting a set of vital business operations. This is critical to the alignment of IT with the business and consequent greater engagement between the parties.

Currently, IT and other departments are continually getting closer, whether to contribute to the best performance of the company or to seek better solutions to customers— all this is a natural part of the process of breaking down internal silos, seeking a better and more efficient corporation. So nothing more natural than ITOM being closely aligned with the needs of the company.

Key benefits of IT operational management

• Increased availability: With proper management, your levels of availability of critical services will consistently improve. This is undoubtedly great value for the company.
• Risk Elimination: With proper management, your responses to alerts that occur on a day-to-day level will be accurate, and you will eliminate inherent risks from the process of using technological components.
• Customer and user satisfaction: With proper management, the visibility of the work of the IT operations team will be translated into transparency and recognition by its users and customers. This is a critical point in the removal of silos in companies —the recognition of the value that each area promotes for others.

By Emauri Gaspar, Cofounder of Run2biz.