What is IT operations management (ITOM)?

Key takeaways: IT operations management (ITOM) is the day-to-day practice of running, monitoring, and maintaining the infrastructure, devices, networks, and applications a business depends on, so services stay available, secure, and cost-effective.

• What it is: The operational half of ITSM — provisioning, device and server management, network and access management, monitoring, and first response when something breaks — supported by capacity, problem, and change management.

• Why it matters: When ITOM is mature, incidents are fewer and shorter, compliance work gets done, and IT capacity is allocated to planned work rather than firefighting.

• How Jira Service Management helps: Brings incident, problem, change, asset, and configuration management into a single platform, with built-in automation and reporting to identify where operations need tuning.

IT operations management (ITOM) is the practice of running and maintaining the technology a business depends on — servers, networks, devices, cloud and SaaS platforms, and the applications running on them — so that services remain available, secure, and cost-effective. It’s the operational side of IT service management, where ITSM defines how services are designed and delivered. ITOM is the day-to-day work of keeping them running and responding first when they don’t.

This guide covers the functions that fall under ITOM, how it relates to ITSM and ITIL, its benefits and common challenges, and how to get started.

Common ITOM functions

Identifying which functions fall under ITOM is the first step in building an ITOM process that streamlines your IT team's most costly activities. Generally, ITOM is responsible for all devices, services, infrastructure, and applications, and ensuring that all are stable and secure. Common ITOM functions include the following:

• IT Help Desk

• Incident management

• Laptop provisioning

• Device management

• Network infrastructure management 

• Server management

• SaaS/PaaS management 

• Data security

• Access management

How to get started with ITOM

IT professionals spend most of their time in operations. If you have an IT help desk with SLAs, you've laid the groundwork for efficient IT Ops. Understanding some core principles will help your team grow your capabilities and effectiveness. 

Capacity planning

Delivering IT services efficiently is best aided by determining your team's capacity to deliver work and not exceeding that capacity. Capacity planning is a team exercise where folks can share past performance data and use that to arrive at total team bandwidth. Teams can agree on a capacity that leaves room for unforeseen events or aim for full utilization across the team. Capacity planning creates confidence that IT teams can rise to the challenges a business might present and be able to sustain a high quality of work week over week.

Problem management

Problem management is the process of identifying and managing the causes of incidents on an IT service. Problem management isn’t just about finding and fixing incidents, but about identifying and understanding the underlying causes of incidents and determining the best method to eliminate the root cause. Creating a process for problem management fosters confidence that even the most unforeseen issues can be broken down into root causes and addressed accordingly.

Change management

A change can be defined as adding, modifying, or removing anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on IT services. Change management practices ensure efficient, timely handling of changes to IT infrastructure and code. Whether you’re rolling out new services, managing existing ones, or resolving code problems, modern change management approaches break down silos, provide context and transparency, avoid bottlenecks, and minimize risk. 

ITOM vs ITSM key differences

ITOM is a subset of IT Service Management, or ITSM. Think of ITSM as the entire suite of activities that an organization performs to manage IT services. ITOM is a useful container for day-to-day activities focused on maintaining infrastructure, devices, components, and applications. If all these acronyms are feeling overwhelming, adding one more might help! 

ITIL (originally the IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely used framework for ITSM. In ITIL v3, ITOM was mapped to the "Service Operation" stage of the service lifecycle; ITIL 4 replaced the lifecycle with a set of practices, and ITOM work spans several of them — infrastructure and platform management, monitoring and event management, incident management, and service configuration management.

Benefits of IT operations management

Running an IT org without investing in ITOM is like running a marathon without training. Sure, you might be able to brute force your way to the finish line, but at what cost? IT orgs that optimize run like the pros. A pacer keeps you on time, the feed zones keep you fueled up, and the training you’ve done results in your best times yet. Here are some of the benefits you can expect ITOM to unlock in your business:

1. Reduces costs

The cost of an incident can be staggering. By managing capacity, eliminating the root causes of problems, and responding to change, ITOM keeps services running and employees productive while limiting the business's exposure to costly incidents. When incidents occur, ITOM teams use software and systems to ensure the right work reaches the right teammate at the right time. Additionally, a focus on IT infrastructure and operations reduces overall overhead costs for the business.

2. Improves compliance

Some things you just have to do. Compliance often falls into that category. Let’s say all new laptops require two-factor authentication (2FA), and your team is just starting this work. Rather than charge ahead, ITOM practices would encourage the documentation of the full 2FA workflow and the use of an IT service management tool that ensures everything gets done. ITOM helps teammates do both the work they have to do, such as compliance, and the work they want to do, such as setting new employees up for success. 

3. Increases security

We don’t pretend to know your security protocols, but we can certainly get excited about meeting and exceeding them. In a world where your IT professionals have well-documented processes, available capacity, and efficient tools, a focus on security can flourish. The best teams create escalation paths, fast-track root cause analysis, and record workarounds to minimize the impact of a security breach.

4. Increases productivity

One of the miracles of capacity management is that by reducing the amount of work in progress, work gets done faster. Imagine if someone tossed a whole bucket of ping pong balls at you. You might get lucky and catch two. Now imagine that only three balls are tossed. You’ll often surprise yourself and catch all three. ITOM teams generally find that their productivity increases as their ITOM processes mature. 

5. Improves customer service

We’ve arrived at a great moment where our service desk tools can create the right expectation for our customers. By investing in ITOM, we are able to more reliably hit our SLAs and delight our customers. Many will take it a step further and publish their workflows which creates even more transparency about what work needs to be done and in what order.  

Challenges in IT operations management

It’d be tempting to say that the biggest challenge in IT ops is the ever-growing backlog of work to be done. Many seasoned IT professionals would say that their challenges came not from the size of the backlog but from the shortcuts that got taken thanks to a looming backlog. ITOM helps teammates feel secure in spending extra time to follow a workflow that helps avoid common pitfalls, including: 

Data security

Teams focused on provisioning devices, networks, and software will eventually run into data security issues. Fortunately, your team won't be the first to do so. Most teams will break down sensitive work into a workflow that targets those vulnerabilities and secures them step by step. Documenting that workflow and using a work management tool can ensure that your team takes the steps needed to secure your most valuable assets.

Automation

Many teams look to automation to improve the efficiency of their workflows. The question quickly becomes what level of effort justifies the costly work of creating an automation? Processes that are overly automated leave little room for nuance and issues that are under-automated take too much time and effort. Many strategies start with a focus on task frequency, automating things that a teammate needs to do more than once per day. 

Learn more about automation built into Jira Service Management

Scalability

It’s often unclear which services might need to rapidly scale to meet business needs. ITOM teams are often scrambling to scale infrastructure that was not initially built to scale. ITOM teams can better prepare for rapid scaling by standardizing the setup of new systems. While not all systems will eventually scale, establishing a process ahead of time will help avoid potential security and downtime issues. 

Resource management

Is your team full of generalists or specialists? Are you all similarly skilled? What time zones are they in? All these considerations will shape how your ITOM systems make the most of what resources are available. Fortunately, you’ll have a few ways to check in. A tool like Jira Service Management will provide the data you need to understand how your team is performing. We can also look to our friends in Agile! A monthly retrospective, as you build out your process, can help everyone understand how things are progressing. 

ITOM tools and software

Remember the humble ticket? ITOM is almost always built on the bedrock of tools and software solutions. Tools will range from extremely flexible and open-ended to purpose built ITOM solutions. A purpose-built tool, like Jira Service Management, comes with automation built in and common workflows ready for use in your IT organization. These automations will help you supercharge your incident, problem, change, asset and configuration management efforts while getting performance data for your next round of optimization.