Operations Is Not Simple: Challenges, Methodologies, and Paths to Sustainable Improvement

When discussing IT operations, many stakeholders mistakenly view the role as merely deploying programs in production, overlooking the extensive technical, procedural, and managerial competencies required. The author emphasizes the need for a coherent knowledge framework centered on scalability, integrating organization, processes, and tools.

The article enumerates a comprehensive set of operational capabilities, ranging from standards implementation (ITIL, ISO20000, ITSS.1) and regulatory compliance to basic infrastructure management, service level agreements, risk and security handling, incident management, continuous delivery, and cost control. It highlights that financial enterprises often face limited automation coverage, especially for complex, high‑value tasks.

Key pain points are categorized into organizational and individual challenges. Organizational issues include low prioritization of operations, increasing business and regulatory demands, expanding data‑center scale, and the need for higher concurrency. Individual challenges involve 24/7 on‑call duties, high pressure, reactive "fire‑fighting" work, limited career growth, and the burden of extensive skill requirements.

To address these challenges, the author proposes a self‑help roadmap:

SRE (Site Reliability Engineering): Combines deep system knowledge, robust processes, and product‑oriented development to balance reliability and velocity.

Operations Development: Builds or adopts automation tools, either through full in‑house development, external solutions, or a hybrid approach, to reduce manual effort.

DevOps: Bridges development and operations through cultural change, standardized environments, and automated delivery pipelines, aiming for faster, higher‑quality releases.

AIOps: Applies big‑data analytics and machine learning to IT data, enhancing automation, anomaly detection, and predictive decision‑making.

For sustainable improvement, the PDCA (Plan‑Do‑Check‑Act) cycle is recommended, aligning operational goals with business objectives, ensuring that organization, processes, and tools evolve together. The transformation path moves from reactive, problem‑driven operations toward proactive, value‑driven, development‑enabled, and intelligent practices.

Ultimately, a resilient operations function requires continuous assessment, standardized and visualized processes, and a toolchain that evolves from automation to digitalization and intelligence, supporting both operational efficiency and strategic business growth.