The Origins of IT Operations Management
In the early days of enterprise IT management, the focus was more on managing devices like networks and hardware. IT management back then was about managing the network in some way to ensure it ran normally and efficiently. This early stage of IT management was the NSM (Network Systems Management) phase, primarily targeting the underlying basic network infrastructure. NSM systems provided real-time, unified monitoring of low-level devices in the network. When problems occurred or were about to occur, NSM would alert network administrators with fault location and alarms, which undoubtedly made the network administrator’s job much easier. However, NSM systems could only perform simple management for the various business systems running on the network and their users. This period of IT management can be called the network operations management stage, and the IT personnel of this time were called network administrators, or net admins for short.
As enterprise IT systems became increasingly mature and complex, the focus of businesses shifted from single-point management to comprehensive management, and from a single network focus to concern for business systems. The reason is that more and more enterprises realized that business systems involve an increasing number of links, and singular network operations management was no longer sufficient to meet management needs. There was a need to implement how to safeguard every link of the business system. On the basis of satisfying unified management of IT resources, reducing operational costs, improving emergency response capabilities, and enhancing service quality and efficiency, it became even more necessary to ensure the normal operation of business systems to realize the value of IT investments. Simultaneously, in the domestic IT management field, with the expansion of user IT scale, the development of IT technology, and the increase in user demands, the original network management systems were far from meeting the current user requirements.
Therefore, domestic users urgently needed a platform capable of unified management of all IT resources, solving the various difficulties faced by IT resources, while also effectively safeguarding business systems and offering improvement suggestions.
Under this premise, the concept and products of IT operations management were first introduced by well-known domestic network operations management vendors. It can be said that its emergence was an effective interpretation of the current user needs. This period of IT management was termed IT operations management, and the IT personnel of this time were called IT operations staff.
The Relationship Between ITIL and IT Operations Management
ITIL was born abroad, out of a need to manage the IT and business of industries with large departments and high requirements for business assurance, such as telecommunications and finance, in an orderly and transparent manner. Thus, the ITIL standard was created. The core idea of the ITIL standard is to improve staff work efficiency and IT service quality by making IT management process-oriented, allowing IT systems to better serve the business, thereby escorting the stable operation of business systems. The bottom layer of the ITIL standard is the management of IT infrastructure, and the top layer is the process-oriented management of business systems.
So, what exactly is the relationship between ITIL and IT operations management?
Just as mentioned at the beginning of the article, the initial purpose of enterprises setting up an IT department for IT management was the hope that the IT department could discover and solve various problems originating from the underlying infrastructure, thereby ensuring the normal operation of the network and providing high-quality IT services to the enterprise. However, with the continuous development of enterprise IT systems and business, users found that simply managing the underlying IT infrastructure could not solve the disconnect between the underlying network and the upper-layer business systems. This is also the problem initially encountered by the ITIL standard. Initially, it was mainly used for the process-oriented and standardized management of IT department personnel, but it neglected the management of the underlying platform and the safeguarding of business systems. ITIL, divorced from the actual needs of users, was like a castle in the air, unattainable. In recent years, to better align with the work needs of IT operations management departments, ITIL began to integrate with enterprise business system assurance, forming a management model known as BSM (Business Service Management), with the aim of enabling ITIL to better serve enterprise IT operations management.
But the problem is that, no matter from which perspective, the ITIL standard is merely a set of methodologies and does not tell us exactly how to implement the specific processes. In reality, these processes are built upon the accumulated experience of how to find and solve problems in the daily process of IT management. However, what enterprises need to achieve with ITIL are results, and they won’t pay excessive attention to how this process unfolds. Therefore, IT management vendors need to solve this problem. So, how to find problems, and how to solve them, requires the IT operations management system provided by IT management vendors. Through the IT operations management system, various problems from the IT system can be discovered and resolved, ensuring the normal operation of the enterprise network and the business systems running on it. Through this process, continuous experience is accumulated, on which basis the process-oriented management of ITIL can truly be implemented.
Beta Software believes that IT operations management is the underlying foundation of the ITIL standard system. Only by solidly building this underlying foundation can process-oriented management be truly implemented on top of