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.

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.