In today’s digital economy, seconds matter. For mission-driven organizations, seconds can be a matter of life and death, and service reliability can make or break access to suicide and safety hotlines, disaster relief, time-critical health care, food assistance, and more. That’s where real-time digital operations comes in.
Complex incidents are both exhausting and commonplace. In this case, incidents that I am referring to as “complex” are incidents that involve multiple, disparate, notifications in your alert management platform. Perhaps these incidents are logically separated because the underlying systems or services were seen as less coupled than they turned out to be in reality.
Modern businesses are digital businesses—so managing your business means mastering your critical services and operations for your employees and customers. Today, you need to be able to understand every aspect of your company—as it unfolds—because in this world, seconds matter to your productivity, your revenue, and most importantly, your customers.
“Customer obsessed.” “Customer-centric.” “Customer-first.” For CEO’s everywhere, setting and maintaining a coordinated focus on the customer has become a top priority when driving innovation. After all, for many organizations regardless of industry, digital customer experiences are what can make or break the bottom line.
In this digital era, technology systems are becoming increasingly complex. No longer can a single SME (subject matter expert) understand every facet of the system they run. Instead, much of this knowledge is siloed and exists as tribal knowledge within certain teams. Additionally, the rate of change is faster than ever, with code deploying and new services shipping at a rate unimaginable a few years ago.
Digital operations management is about harnessing the power of data to act when it matters the most. It’s also about having the right processes and procedures to support teams when every second is critical. Maturing your digital operations takes time, iteration, and commitment. The change won’t happen overnight. But, if you put in the effort, you’ll reap outsized benefits. You’ll be able to learn from incidents and proactively improve your services over time.
The way we socialize, learn, shop, and receive care has changed drastically over the last 18 months. For many of us, perhaps one of the most drastic changes was the way we work. While work from home (WFH) was an option before the pandemic, NCCI states, “only 6% of the employed worked primarily from home and about three-quarters of workers had never worked from home.” Fast forward to 2021, and according to NorthOne, here’s how much things have changed.
In the last two years, we have seen the rise of remote and hybrid work, and with that, a proliferation of tools and apps needed to support critical communication and collaboration. Finding that app-life balance has become increasingly complex, so simplifying “how” we work is key for every organization.
People are more than happy to talk about their successes, but if you ask them about their failures, they can be much more hesitant to share. Failure is a subject that, interestingly enough, is entangled with the emotion of shame. Yet it’s integral to achieving anything novel, and the learnings that come from failure are unparalleled. So, let’s find ways to get more comfortable with failing, and figure out why people fear it.
It’s 2 AM and you’re paged when you’re still awake – how well can you find what you need to fix the latest mistake? When the incident begins it might only be impacting a single service, but as time progresses, your brain boots, the coffee is poured, the docs are read, and all the while as the incident is escalating to other services and teams that you might not see the alerts for if they’re not in your scope of ownership.
