Across the globe, in-person technology events are beginning to emerge from their pandemic hibernation. For developers and DevOps teams, no event has been more anticipated than AWS re:Invent, which is back in Las Vegas, November 29th — December 3rd to help bring us all back together and slowly let us find our new normal. While handshakes may be replaced by elbow bumps or other newfound greeting rituals, we are excited to be back and see all of you in real life.

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.

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.

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.

Lisa Wolfe, product marketing director at ServiceNow, co-wrote this blog. The stream of global disruptions these past couple of years has not only put business continuity plans to the test, but has also tested the ability of organizations to simply survive. To operate at the “speed of a digital business” and to endure the next wave of unexpected change will require peripheral vision—the ability to help predict and fix issues before they impact employees or the business.

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.