IT Operations Consulting

Operations... make sure that the services and products you offer your clients are delivered in the most efficient way possible. IT Operations makes sure that the applications and infrastructure that your delivery depends on is solid.

Gert Taeymans has over 20 years experience in directing the implementation and management of mission-critical services for businesses in high-volume international markets. Strong track record in risk management, crisis management including disaster recovery, service delivery and change & config management.

There are many different definitions of this:

• Joe Hertvik defines IT Operations as being "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."
• Ernest Mueller defines IT operations as "a blanket term for systems engineers, system administrators, operations staff, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers, security professionals, and various other sub-disciplines and job titles."
• Gartner defines IT operations as "the people and management processes associated with IT service management to deliver the right set of services at the right quality and at competitive costs for customers."

IT operations is generally viewed as a separate department from software development. Within DevOps and Agile environments, IT Operations tends to become the "remainder" of activities: the business departments want their IT people or sub contractors to focus on delivering new functionalities, rather than "operating" the existing offerings.

This will lead to a host of problems that need to be addressed. From a business perspective, your existing systems and applications need to be kept up to date, they need to be tested for resilience on a regular basis and changes to the environment need to be done in a controlled way, regardless of the development framework used.

Via a strong understanding of business processes and standards, with an innate knowledge of the work flows necessary to maintain a smoothly performing technology & operations organization, I have a proven history of enhancing efficiencies and reducing expenses. I do this via initiatives to overhaul existing processes, introduce new technologies, and define more effective operating standards.

Through listening to and learning from clients and colleagues, we can reach new targets together.

Gert Taeymans bvba can be contracted in two ways:

• Via long term contracts on site at your location
• Via study assignments to analyse a specific issue and recommend solutions. Analysis is typically done via a limited number of days on-site or via interviews. The analysis is performed off site, presentations done either via conferencing or on-site.