Information technology operations

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Information technology operations, or IT operations, are the superset of all processes and services that are both provisioned by an IT staff to their internal or external clients and used by themselves, to run themselves as a business.

The definition of IT operations differ throughout the IT industry, where vendors and individual organizations often create their own custom definitions of such processes and services for the purpose of marketing their own products. Usually, they include management, envisioning, planning, design, implementation, construction, deployment, distribution, verification, installation, instantiation, execution and maintenance. They endeavor to define common processes and procedures, policies, roles, responsibilities, terminology, best practices and standards for running an enterprise.

Best practice subsets of IT operations are ITIL, RUP, SDLC, MSF and MOF, which, while productive and focused, cover limited areas of what an enterprise needs.