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.

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.