Do businesses need IT operations management?

Over the last decade, digital transformation has evolved to become a key strategy for businesses seeking to ensure their continued success and competitiveness in an increasingly technology-driven world.

Sparked by the growth of cloud computing, this focus on digitization has gained momentum as excitement about and investment in AI services intensify.

One of the known side-effects of digital transformation, however, is sprawl. This can be cloud sprawl or software sprawl, and is often both.

Using many different software platforms in an organization isn’t inherently bad, but it does make life harder for the IT department when it comes to things like software lifecycles and patching.

IT operations management – known more simply as ITOM – is one way of combatting sprawl and also encompasses other areas of resource management like hardware and networking.

What is ITOM?

According to analyst house Gartner’s glossary, “(ITOM) software is intended to represent all the tools needed to manage the provisioning, capacity, performance and availability of computing, networking and application resources – as well as the overall quality, efficiency and experience of their delivery”.

ITOM’s relationship with IT service management (ITSM) is somewhat debated. For some, ITOM is part of ITSM, for others, they are allied disciplines within IT management that are deeply intertwined but separate.

The key difference between the two, according to IBM, is that ITOM focuses on “the behind-the-scenes service management that’s not typically visible to the end user”.

“IT operations management (ITOM) is responsible for managing information technology requirements within an organization, overseeing the provisioning, capacity, performance, and availability of IT infrastructure and resources. This includes computing, networking and application resources, both on premises and in cloud (sic),” explains the company.

ITSM, on the other hand, is user-centric and focuses on the IT department operating as a service provider within the business.

When it comes to what ITOM solutions might cover, Gartner has divided the market into “three minisuite categories – delivery automation, experience management, and performance analysis – in addition to a roll-up of mainframe and other nonspecified ITOM tools”.

Some specific examples of the types of tools:

• Configuration management database, providing a centralized view of all IT assets, their configurations, and the relationships between them
• Container management, for the automated creation, deployment, and scaling of containers
• PaaS resource usage and performance monitoring
• Event management and performance metrics

ITOps, ITSM, and the role of automation in ITOM

Another acronym sometimes thrown into the mix, along with ITSM and ITOM, is IT operations. (ITOps).

ITOps covers day-to-day operations and is the bread and butter of system administrators. ITSM is highly automated and process-driven, whereas ITOps is more reactive and operational in nature.

According to ITSM and customer service software provider Freshworks: “(ITOM) sits at the intersection of ITOps and ITSM. It automates and orchestrates infrastructure operations. It enables visibility, event correlation, and predictive remediation across hybrid environments. ITOM makes operations smarter and scalable.”

Like ITSM, ITOM relies on automation and automated workflows.

"ITOM uses automation techniques to make enterprise IT operations faster, easier, and more reliable,” Freshworks explains. “ITOM also helps streamline your incident categorization, building knowledge bases, and ticket assignment processes.”

Automation in the mid-2020s increasingly includes not only traditional ITTT and other rule-based workflows but also AI and machine learning. In the realm of ITOM, this can mean enhanced predictive analytics, automated incident response, real-time anomaly detection, and more.

Generative AI in the form of chatbots can also provide a smoother experience for both IT professionals and end users when trying to scrutinise logs and data, or provision a new service or device.

Is ITOM necessary for all businesses?

Not every business will need ITOM. For small businesses and startups, something as comprehensive as ITOM or any other subgenre of ITSM isn’t going to be needed because their IT estate and IT team will be too small.

For more established businesses that are medium-sized to large enterprises, ITOM is definitely worth considering as part of a wider ITSM play.

Strategies like ITOM are a force multiplier for organizations’ IT departments, increasing the number of actions that can be carried out in a day through automation and AI agents. It can also reduce the amount of time IT professionals spend manually monitoring networks and responding to requests to scale resources up or down – with the implementation of just a few pre-set parameters, admins and others in the IT department can turn their attention to more valuable tasks that really do require a human touch.

Software sprawl and excessively manual processes are some of the scars businesses bear from going through digital transformation. ITOM, in concert with ITOps, AIOps, and other members of the ITSM family, can help businesses trim back these remnants of their past and streamline their IT processes for the next stage of IT evolution.