Information technology operations, or IT operations, are the set 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. Also could be defined as: "IT Operations is responsible for the smooth functioning of the infrastructure and operational environments that support application deployment to internal and external customers, including the network infrastructure; server and device management; computer operations; IT infrastructure library (ITIL) management; and help desk services for an organization."
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.
IT operations management, ITOM, help organizations to operate in a smoother manner, and also allow for more consistency and quality with their services. This is also true for IT operations analytics, ITOA.