In today’s digital economy, operational resilience isn’t just important – it’s essential. The global IT outage on July 19 last year served as a stark reminder of how vulnerable digital operations can be, exposing the immense pressure that technical disruptions place on business and IT leaders.This vulnerability manifests in several critical ways:Loss of control: Organizations often learn about issues from their customers rather than their monitoring systems, creating a reactive rather than proactive response posture.Reputational risk: Delayed awareness of problems can significantly damage both revenue streams and brand reputation.Organizational barriers: Teams frequently find themselves hampered by departmental silos, struggling to coordinate effective responses across different parts of the organization.With outages potentially costing millions of dollars in losses, operations teams must develop the agility to respond to and resolve major failures swiftly and effectively.The Operations ChasmA fundamental shift in operational capability is reshaping the competitive landscape, creating a clear distinction between market leaders and laggards. This growing divide isn’t merely about technological adoption — it represents a strategic inflection point that directly affects market position, customer retention and shareholder value.On one side stand organizations still anchored to the past. These companies remain tethered to legacy systems and manual processes, struggling with inefficient and costly operations that consistently deliver subpar customer experiences. Their adherence to outdated methodologies puts both revenue and reputation at constant risk, leaving them particularly vulnerable to major disruptions in an increasingly volatile digital landscape.On the other side are the forward-thinking organizations that have embraced the future. These industry leaders have fully leveraged modern, automated operations and harnessed the power of AI to streamline processes and reduce costs. Through their innovative approach, they’ve built robust operational resilience that enables them to successfully manage both digital and physical operations. Their reliable service consistently earns and maintains customer trust, while their operational excellence sets them distinctly apart from competitors in the marketplace.The message is clear: Organizations must bridge this divide to remain competitive. Crossing this chasm requires more than incremental improvements. It demands a fundamental transformation in operational approach, embracing AI and automation to build the resilience necessary for today’s digital landscape.Key Transformations for Crossing the Operational ChasmThere are several transformations organizations can undergo to modernize their operations. Operations center modernization: Modernizing the operations center focuses on improving efficiency and reducing noise by leveraging AI and automation to reduce noisy alerts and enhance real-time visibility and responsiveness. Modernization involves automating routine tasks, intelligently grouping alerts and using dynamic routing to prioritize critical issues. These will help to reduce downtime, improve customer experiences and optimize resource allocation, ensuring a more resilient and agile operations center. Automation standardization: Creating an automation center of excellence (CoE) involves creating a single centralized team responsible for organization-wide automation efforts. This team can bridge islands of automation by creating a centralized library of runbooks and workflows to manage planned and unplanned work. By using automation assets and libraries, teams have the autonomy to apply automation through a standardized framework in their context, ultimately helping to reduce risk. Incident management transformation: Transforming the end-to-end incident management life cycle involves going from a patchwork of manual, error-prone steps to one that is powered and enabled by AI and automation, including networks of agents. For example, AI agents can take on the heavy lifting of data analysis, rapidly detecting issues, assessing root causes and advising on or initiating remediation steps. By autonomously collaborating to gather context and drive actions, AI agents can reduce manual toil, accelerate resolution and support IT operations teams in managing both routine and novel incidents more effectively. Incident management transformation also extends to collaboration by facilitating communication in the channels that the teams use. Finally, transforming incident management means using every incident as an opportunity to learn, preventing teams from repeatedly dealing with the same issues. This enables teams to continuously evaluate incident management workflows and tailor strategies to specific use cases and applications. Customer experience operations: For many organizations, barriers exist between customer experience and IT teams, leaving those in customer-facing roles without context on the issues that customers raise to them. Customer experience operations mean breaking down these barriers to drive greater collaboration and communication between customer service teams, the technical teams working on resolving the issue and the wider business. Customer service teams are brought into the incident management process so they can give customers real-time updates on incidents and their impact, enabling proactivity in customer communications.Digital operations resiliency: Digital operations resiliency is a proactive approach to safeguarding critical business services by reducing downtime and ensuring seamless customer experiences. It focuses on minimizing operational disruptions, protecting brand reputation and mitigating business risk through standardized incident management, automation and compliance with service-level agreements (SLAs). Real-time issue resolution, efficient workflows and continuous improvement are put into place to ensure operational efficiency at scale, helping to provide uninterrupted service delivery. AI agents can play an important role here as they can continuously monitor for potential issues by surfacing relevant context and recommendations, as well as dynamically coordinating response efforts. Scaled service ownership: Service ownership is the practice of making developers responsible for supporting the software they deliver throughout its life cycle, bringing development teams closer to their customers, the business and the value being delivered. This makes service owners subject matter experts for their services who are responsible for responding to production issues. So when an incident arises, teams can quickly identify the right people to diagnose and resolve complex issues. As this process becomes more mature, organizations can have service owners create runbooks and workflows to address common or recurring issues. Service ownership will also see organizations better learn from incidents, with subject matter experts incorporating historical context into response strategies, helping to improve business resilience over time. Remote location operations automation: In many organizations, distributed shops or locations don’t have dedicated IT teams onsite to troubleshoot and fix problems. Resolution may ultimately fall to baristas or office managers, while supported by central IT. Automation can be a key factor in fixing this problem. Automation can detect and take real-time action on failures across point-of-sale (POS) systems, endpoints, IT systems and more. Automated processes and runbooks can then trigger diagnosis, remediation and maintenance of affected systems and services.Focus on the Transformations That Best Suit Your SituationStrategic modernization of operations requires a tailored approach aligned with organizational priorities and capabilities. While our research has identified seven distinct transformation pathways, success lies not in attempting to implement all strategies simultaneously, but in selecting and executing the initiatives that best address your organization’s specific operational challenges and strategic objectives.The optimal modernization strategy should emerge from a thorough assessment of your current operational framework, core competencies and mission-critical pain points. This targeted approach enables precise resource allocation and ensures investments in operational transformation deliver measurable business value and enhanced response capabilities.The post How Organizations Can Cross the Operational Chasm appeared first on The New Stack.