Chapter 1. Overview of Operations Management

Before we delve into the technology at hand, the System Center Configuration Manager product, it's important to define what operations management is, what it defines, and why we need it. As an IT manager, you are not responsible for certain key business activities. When those activities are being processed on your servers, however, you become a critical piece of the puzzle in overall IT systems management. You may control the SQL servers, but they house information that is critical to day-to-day operation of the Billing department, for example. Suddenly, you start to see how everything ties together. A missing or damaged link in the chain, or an unplanned removal of the chain, may cause much more damage than you originally thought.

This is just one of the many reasons Microsoft created the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), which is based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The idea behind MOF and ITIL is to create a complete team structure with the ultimate goal of service excellence. Numerous groups fall under the IT Department tag, but we often see many of them acting as separate departments rather than as one cohesive unit. Desktop support, application developers, server support, storage administrators, and so forth are all members of IT, but they are not always as unified as they should be.