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.

Companies that underwent accelerated digital transformations during the past 18 months are looking to understand how they can improve their operational maturity to handle the increase in complexity. This is paramount to an organizations’ future success.

This is the final blog in our series focusing on CloudOps maturity, where we’ve been looking at the key findings from a recent IDC study, commissioned by PagerDuty. In our previous blogs, we discussed the people-based transformations and the technological changes that organizations must undergo to mature their CloudOps practices.

There’s an incident. Your teams need to communicate with the development team that owns the service, but that team is too busy to stop and chat. Meanwhile, you in central IT have business leaders asking for updates, angry internal users calling the help desk, and customer service representatives asking for information. You have hundreds of tickets all pertaining to the incident in your ticketing system.

Digital transformation accelerated for many companies during the last 18 months. While it may have been on the agenda prior to COVID-19, teams were pushed to extreme speeds to digitize and meet the rising online demand. During this time, organizations learned important lessons that they’ll carry on with them into this new future. Leaders can take these learnings and use them to build better products, healthier and more efficient teams, and a happier customer base.

This July, we launched The State of Digital Operations, which sheds light on the volume of real-time work, its growth over time, and how that increasingly burdens technical teams.