What is IT Operations Management?

Core components of IT operations management

IT operations management encompasses several interconnected components that work together to ensure the smooth functioning of IT services. These include:

Infrastructure management

Infrastructure management involves overseeing the hardware, software, network components, and facilities that support an organization's IT services—including servers, storage systems, network devices, cloud resources, and data centers. Effective infrastructure management requires a comprehensive approach to capacity planning, performance optimization, and resource allocation.

Modern infrastructure management has evolved beyond traditional on-premises data centers to encompass hybrid and multicloud environments. This expansion introduces new challenges in terms of visibility, governance, and operational consistency across diverse platforms. Organizations must implement tools and processes that provide unified management capabilities across these heterogeneous environments to avoid creating operational silos that increase complexity and risk.

Service monitoring, observability, and AIOps

Service monitoring and observability focus on ensuring that IT services meet defined performance, availability, and quality standards. This involves continuous monitoring of services, tracking key performance indicators, and implementing service level agreements (SLAs) to set expectations and measure performance.

Effective service monitoring requires end-to-end visibility across the entire service delivery chain, from underlying infrastructure to application performance and user experience. While monitoring can tell you “what happened,” observability can tell you “what’s happening now” to assist troubleshooting complex microservice applications. Modern AIOps brings advanced analytics and machine learning to detect patterns, identify anomalies, and predict potential issues before they impact users, while applying automation to resolve known errors. This proactive approach helps organizations maintain service quality while reducing the operational burden on IT teams.

Incident and problem management

Incident management addresses service disruptions and works to restore normal operations as quickly as possible. Problem management, on the other hand, focuses on identifying and addressing the root causes of incidents to prevent recurrence. Together, these processes help minimize the impact of service disruptions on business operations.

Organizations with mature incident and problem management capabilities can significantly reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and the frequency of service disruptions. They achieve these results by implementing structured processes for incident classification, escalation, and resolution—and supporting those processes with automation and knowledge management systems that capture lessons learned and best practices.

Change and configuration management

Change management governs how modifications to IT systems are proposed, evaluated, approved, implemented, and reviewed. Configuration management maintains accurate records of IT assets and their relationships, ensuring that the organization has a clear understanding of its IT environment and how changes might impact it.

Effective change and configuration management reduces the risk of service disruptions caused by poorly planned or executed changes. It provides a structured approach to evaluating change requests, assessing potential impacts, and implementing changes in a controlled manner. Configuration management databases (CMDBs) serve as the foundation for these processes by maintaining an accurate inventory of IT assets and their interdependencies.

Performance and capacity management

Performance management focuses on optimizing the speed, efficiency, and reliability of IT services. Capacity management ensures that sufficient resources are available to meet current and future business requirements while avoiding overprovisioning and unnecessary costs.

These disciplines rely on data-driven approaches to understand resource utilization patterns, identify performance bottlenecks, and forecast future capacity needs. By implementing robust performance and capacity management practices, organizations can balance service quality and cost-effectiveness while ensuring they can scale to meet changing business demands.

Key challenges in IT operations management

Organizations face numerous challenges in managing their IT operations effectively. Understanding these challenges is essential for developing strategies to address them.

Increasing complexity of IT environments

Today's IT environments span on-premises infrastructure, multiple cloud platforms, edge computing, and various Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. This heterogeneity creates significant challenges for visibility, governance, and operational consistency. At a recent OpenText™ customer advisory council, CIOs and VPs expressed serious concerns about growing complexity in their environments, alongside issues with user experiences, high cloud spending, and skilled staff shortages.

The complexity is further amplified by modern application architectures based on microservices, containers, and serverless computing, which offer benefits in terms of agility and scalability but introduce new operational challenges related to monitoring, troubleshooting, and securing highly distributed systems.

User experience challenges

User satisfaction with IT services has become a critical metric for measuring IT operations effectiveness. Forrester's The State of the Service Desk 2024 report reveals that 61% of employees avoid the service desk, and the same percentage live with ongoing IT issues that the service desk can't fix. This avoidance behavior indicates significant problems with service desk accessibility, effectiveness, and user trust that must be addressed through improved service management approaches.

When users bypass official support channels or live with unresolved issues, it creates shadow IT, reduces productivity, and can introduce security risks—all of which impact business performance and reputation.

Rising costs and technical debt

Organizations face increasing pressure to control IT costs while delivering more capabilities. According to Gartner's Technology Adoption Roadmap: Key Findings for I&O Technology Investments (2024), high or unpredictable costs increased from being the top risk for 11% of technologies in 2023 to 25% in 2024. This trend highlights the growing importance of cost management as a key focus area for IT operations teams.

Meanwhile, technical debt continues to accumulate in many organizations. Forbes.com's Technical Debt Demands Your Attention (2023) reports that 70% of CIOs, CTOs, and other technology leaders view technical debt as a major drag on their organization's ability to innovate. This debt manifests as outdated systems, suboptimal architectures, and workarounds that become increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain over time.

Skills gaps and resource constraints

IT operations teams often face pressure to manage increasingly complex environments with limited resources. According to Ernst and Young's Tech Skills Transformation Report (2023), 81% of organizations are experiencing a shortage of skilled tech workers, and 70% said these skills shortages were holding them back. The rapid pace of technological change makes it difficult for IT professionals to maintain expertise across all relevant domains, leading to skills gaps that impact operational effectiveness.

This challenge is compounded by competitive talent markets that make it difficult to recruit and retain skilled IT operations staff, forcing organizations to find ways to accomplish more with limited human resources.

Balancing innovation and stability

IT operations teams must balance the need for stability and reliability with business demands for agility and innovation. This tension often manifests in conflicts between development teams pushing for rapid feature delivery and operations teams concerned about maintaining service quality and security. Organizations that fail to resolve this tension effectively may experience either excessive caution that impedes innovation or frequent service disruptions caused by inadequate operational controls.

DevOps practices aim to address this challenge by fostering collaboration between development and operations teams, implementing automated testing and deployment pipelines, and adopting infrastructure as code approaches that enable consistent and repeatable changes. The specialized role of site reliability engineers (SREs) is to throttle the pace of new features when error budgets, defined in service level objectives (SLOs), are exceeded. These practices help organizations deliver innovation more rapidly while maintaining operational stability.

Managing cloud costs and complexity

While cloud computing offers numerous benefits, it also introduces challenges related to cost management, governance, and operational consistency. Many organizations struggle with unexpected cloud costs, shadow IT, and the complexity of managing hybrid and multicloud environments. Without effective management practices, the flexibility and scalability of cloud computing can lead to resource sprawl, security vulnerabilities, and inefficient spending.

Cloud management platforms, FinOps practices, and automated governance policies help organizations address these challenges by providing visibility into cloud resource usage, implementing cost optimization strategies, and ensuring consistent security and compliance controls across cloud environments. These capabilities are increasingly essential as organizations continue to expand their use of cloud services.

Best practices for effective IT operations management

Organizations can enhance their IT operations management capabilities by adopting proven best practices that address common challenges and leverage industry standards.

Implementing comprehensive asset discovery and management

Accurate information about IT assets forms the foundation for effective operations management. Organizations should implement automated discovery tools that continuously scan their environment to identify and classify assets, track changes, and maintain up-to-date configuration information. This comprehensive visibility enables better decision-making, simplifies troubleshooting, and supports compliance efforts.

Asset discovery should extend beyond traditional infrastructure to encompass cloud resources, containers, virtual machines, and software dependencies. The resulting data should be maintained in a CMDB that serves as a single source of truth for asset information and supports various operational processes, including change management, incident response, and capacity planning.

Adopting a service-oriented approach

A service-oriented approach to IT operations management focuses on delivering and maintaining IT services that meet business needs rather than simply managing technology components. This perspective helps align IT operations with business objectives and provides a framework for prioritizing activities based on their impact on critical services.

Organizations should define service catalogs that clearly describe available IT services, their components, dependencies, and associated service level agreements. This service context helps IT operations teams understand the business impact of technical issues, prioritize their responses accordingly, and communicate more effectively with business stakeholders about service performance and improvement opportunities.

Leveraging automation and orchestration

Automation reduces the manual effort required for routine operational tasks, improves consistency, and enables IT teams to focus on higher-value activities. Orchestration extends automation by coordinating multiple automated tasks into end-to-end workflows that can span different systems and teams.

Organizations should identify repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone operational tasks as candidates for automation. Common examples include server provisioning, software deployment, configuration updates, backup operations, and incident response procedures. By implementing automation incrementally and measuring the results, organizations can build momentum and demonstrate value while developing the skills and processes needed for broader automation initiatives.

Implementing AIOps and predictive analytics

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) combines machine learning, big data analytics, and automation to enhance various aspects of IT operations management. AIOps platforms analyze large volumes of operational data to identify patterns, detect anomalies, predict potential issues, and recommend or automate remediation actions.

Organizations can leverage AIOps to enhance monitoring capabilities, streamline incident management, optimize resource utilization, and support capacity planning. The effectiveness of AIOps depends on the quality and completeness of the data it analyzes, highlighting the importance of comprehensive monitoring and data collection across the IT environment.

Adopting DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices

DevOps and SRE practices promote collaboration between development and operations teams, emphasize automation, and focus on measuring and improving reliability. These approaches help organizations deliver changes more rapidly while maintaining operational stability.

Key DevOps and SRE practices include infrastructure as code, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), automated testing, and the use of SLOs to define and measure reliability targets. Organizations can adopt these practices incrementally, starting with specific applications or services and expanding based on lessons learned and demonstrated benefits.

The role of IT operations management in digital transformation

Digital transformation initiatives depend on robust IT operations to deliver and sustain new digital capabilities. IT operations management plays several critical roles in supporting these initiatives:

Enabling agility and innovation

Effective IT operations management provides the foundation for business agility by ensuring that IT services can be deployed, modified, and scaled rapidly in response to changing requirements. This operational agility enables organizations to experiment with new digital capabilities, learn from user feedback, and iterate quickly to improve their offerings.

Modern IT operations practices such as infrastructure as code, automated testing, and continuous delivery enable rapid and reliable changes to IT services. By implementing these practices, organizations can reduce the lead time for delivering new capabilities while maintaining service quality and security, thereby accelerating their digital transformation initiatives.

Improving reliability and performance of digital services

Digital transformation often increases the organization's dependence on technology, making the reliability and performance of IT services more critical than ever. IT operations management ensures that digital services meet performance expectations, remain available to users, and recover quickly from any disruptions.

Advanced monitoring and analytics capabilities provide visibility into service performance from both technical and user experience perspectives. This comprehensive view helps IT operations teams identify and address performance issues before they impact users, maintain service quality as usage patterns evolve, and continuously improve the reliability of digital services.

Managing cloud adoption and hybrid environments

Most digital transformation initiatives involve adopting cloud services to gain scalability, flexibility, and access to advanced capabilities. IT operations management plays a crucial role in managing the transition to cloud environments and operating effectively in hybrid and multicloud scenarios.

Organizations need robust cloud operations capabilities to ensure security, compliance, cost efficiency, and operational consistency across diverse cloud environments. These capabilities include cloud monitoring and management tools, automated governance policies, cost optimization practices, and integration with existing operational processes and tools.

Supporting data-driven decision-making

Digital transformation relies heavily on data to drive business insights, automate processes, and personalize customer experiences. IT operations management ensures the availability, performance, and security of the data management platforms that support these data-driven capabilities.

Beyond supporting data platforms, IT operations management itself becomes more data driven through the adoption of AIOps and advanced analytics. These approaches help operations teams analyze large volumes of operational data to identify patterns, predict potential issues, and make more informed decisions about resource allocation, service improvements, and technology investments.

How OpenText solutions enhance IT operations management

OpenText Observability and Service Management Cloud provides a comprehensive enterprise ITOM platform that unifies service management, AIOps, observability, automation, CMDB, network management, and asset management. This integrated approach helps organizations simplify complexity, improve reliability, and optimize costs across their IT operations.

OpenText Observability and Service Management Cloud platform

The OpenText Observability and Service Management Cloud platform serves as a unified solution that reduces the cost and complexity of IT operations through a composable architecture supporting both traditional and cloud-native environments. This platform provides consistent management capabilities across hybrid IT landscapes, eliminating the need for multiple disconnected tools and establishing a single source of truth for operational data. This unified approach enhances decision-making and streamlines processes, making operational freedom the new normal for IT organizations.

Discovery and configuration management

OpenText Universal Discovery and CMDB solutions deliver comprehensive visibility into IT assets and their relationships across diverse environments. These tools automatically discover infrastructure components, applications, and services, maintaining accurate configuration information in a centralized database. This complete view enables organizations to understand dependencies between components, assess change impacts, troubleshoot issues effectively, and maintain compliance requirements, establishing a reliable foundation for enhanced operational processes and informed IT investment decisions.

Observability and monitoring

Our observability platform includes infrastructure observability and application observability solutions, which leverage OpenTelemetry standards to provide cost-effective monitoring across both cloud-native and traditional applications.

OpenText Network Operations Management provides comprehensive, enterprise-ready network management capabilities through integrated monitoring, configuration, and compliance on a unified platform. This solution helps organizations gain complete network monitoring and has an automation capability that can detect compliance and configuration risks, proactively manage networks with real-time insights, and streamline operations by consolidating critical capabilities on a single platform. The solution's advanced automation capabilities reduce manual intervention, ensure compliance, and enable rapid deployment of network services. Industry analysts have recognized OpenText Network Operations Management as a leader and outperformer in network observability.

OpenText Network Node Manager complements these capabilities by discovering and monitoring physical and virtual networks for unified fault and capacity management. Together, OpenText tools enable organizations to quickly detect and diagnose performance issues, maintain service quality, and optimize resource utilization across their entire IT environment.

AI operations and analysis

OpenText AI Operations Management combines multiple AI technologies—predictive, causal, and generative—to enhance IT operations. OpenText Service Management Aviator provides a generative AI assistant that helps administrators analyze events, suggest remediation steps, and explain recommendations transparently. This AI-powered approach enables faster issue resolution, reduces IT staff burden, and maintains higher service quality with fewer resources, addressing key operational challenges in today's complex environments.

Automation and orchestration

Our IT automation solutions includes OpenText Automation Center, which coordinates IT automation across existing domain-specific tools and enables end-to-end process automation that spans different systems and teams. This solution includes a reusable content library that accelerates workflow creation and ensures execution consistency. OpenText Network Automation focuses on network configuration and compliance, while OpenText Cloud Management provides governance and automation for cloud infrastructure. Together, these capabilities help organizations deploy and manage resources more efficiently while maintaining compliance with organizational policies.

Service management and user experience

OpenText Service Management (SMAX) delivers comprehensive capabilities for IT service management, asset management, and enterprise service management. The solution features a generative AI virtual agent that enables self-service resolution and expedites ticket handling. This AI-enhanced approach improves user satisfaction while reducing support costs, and the no-code application development capabilities enable rapid service application creation and modification, supporting organizational agility and innovation.

Optimization and cost management

OpenText Cloud Management helps organizations control cloud spending through resource usage visibility, waste elimination identification, and governance policies that prevent uncontrolled cloud sprawl. OpenText Asset Management provides comprehensive lifecycle and license management for assets across cloud and on-premises environments. This integrated approach to optimization helps organizations avoid compliance risks, optimize licensing costs, and make informed technology investment decisions while maintaining flexibility and scalability.

Conclusion

Modern businesses depend on their technology systems to function properly, making effective IT operations management essential for competitive advantage rather than just a back-office concern. By simplifying complexity, improving reliability, and optimizing costs, robust IT operations enable organizations to focus on innovation and growth rather than troubleshooting problems.

Organizations can address the challenges of IT operations management by implementing several key strategies:

• Establish comprehensive visibility across hybrid IT environments through automated asset discovery and configuration management.
• Adopt unified observability practices that span infrastructure, applications, and networks.
• Leverage AI and automation to enhance operational efficiency and predictive capabilities.
• Implement integrated service management with AI-assisted self-service options.
• Optimize resource utilization and costs across on-premises and cloud environments.

OpenText Observability and Service Management Cloud offers an integrated platform that addresses these requirements through a unified approach. By implementing these capabilities, organizations can transform their IT operations to support business agility and innovation while maintaining the reliability and security their business depends on.

As technology environments continue to evolve and business demands increase, effective IT operations management will remain a critical capability for organizational success. Those who master it will be better positioned to navigate digital transformation, respond to market changes, and deliver exceptional experiences to their customers and employees.