Flexibility and agility are key to business resilience in uncertain times

The news agenda is full of conflicting economic indicators and talk of recession for much of the world. We’ve witnessed stocks dip across Europe, and soaring inflation is putting pressure on central banks to raise interest rates. This is happening at a time when many businesses were still regaining their footings following the pandemic’s various economic and social impacts.

Weathering the storm of economic uncertainty requires one foundational strength: Business resiliency. The way to survive tough times is to prepare before they arrive - or, even better, to thrive despite them. This means that they cannot afford for their IT operations to be disrupted from incidents and outages that slow them down, threaten customer care and service provisioning, stop innovation, and cause staff to burn out.

Business resiliency relies on flexibility and agility

How do we achieve business resilience? Flexibility and agility. The ability to adapt and react to circumstances when infrastructure glitches or an outdated software version fails is key. As businesses increasingly rely on digital operations, business resiliency almost entirely depends on their IT infrastructure and software staying online and functioning as intended. That, or being diagnosable and fixable within an acceptable timeframe.

Organisations are rightfully exploring ways to operate with efficiency and reduce their IT operational teams’ toil. The most forward-thinking also seek to become data-driven so they can laser in on the issues impacting resilience. This holds true for organisations at any level of DevOps maturity. PagerDuty’s 2022 State of Digital Operations report showed that digital complexity is increasing, and incidents are happening more frequently. The levels of flexibility and agility and differing tolerances for business resilience impact what follows.

Some organisations seek to improve their processes and can devote resources to constant optimisation. Others simply need to have the right person make the best fix available in the moment. Regardless of the starting point, business resiliency is improved when digital operations can move to a proactive stance that solves problems before they negatively disrupt the organisation.

The blockers of flexibility and agility

Manual toil, poor processes, inefficient tech, and their inevitable impact on people all get in the way of smooth operations. The fallout for operational teams can be intense and cause burnout, with staff walking away from the stress. 64% of respondents in a PagerDuty customer survey noted they expect increased turnover this year. The further away an organisation is from a good working experience, the more likely it will find other factors going awry as grit compounds in the system. Inefficiency can be as much of a negative flywheel as innovation can be a positive.

Complexity has become a punishing barrier to efficiency - exactly at the moment digital operations must become more complex to meet the needs of employees and customers. Growing software dependencies, often from third-party sources, make change validation a fraught process with increased risk. The volume of data to make sense of the organisation’s technology environment is too much to understand and act on without aid. That automatically puts most organisations on the back foot even before something goes wrong and requires diagnosis and remediation, affecting the MTTR.

This complexity, coupled with the skyrocketing number of systems used within the digital landscape only adds to the problem. Managing these systems’ interactions is essential to seeing the big picture. It’s unfortunately common for an enterprise tech stack to be composed of many silos, hindering collaboration and slowing down customer service and support.

When something does go wrong and incident response comes into play, then suddenly that system's information, those version changes, and that incident information is needed - immediately. Every moment spent trying to understand the situation is a minute not solving the problem. Every action a responder takes on discovery leaves them with less energy to concentrate on resolution.

The foundation of resilience is operational maturity

Operational maturity cuts two ways. It puts the business on a stronger resilience footing and gives staff a better working experience to be able to predictably and effectively manage incidents and maintenance, without frustration coming into effect when any unexpected issue occurs. With digital operations running smoothly, business operations and team matters can be optimally managed, and incidents can even be predicted and prevented.

PagerDuty’s report details five stages of operational maturity and goes into detail regarding the effects on staff attrition and burnout as reported by organisations at differing levels of maturity. We can model customer data to show that those who are merely reactive do regularly witness a greater rate of turnover than those who consider themselves to be at the preventative stage of maturity.

Overcoming these challenges does not require rocket science. There are solutions hinging on easily understood principles, primarily:

● Technology must be enhanced with automation to dramatically increase efficiency and remove the tedious labour asked of the humans in the loop. This means learning to operationalise machine learning and AI models.

● Processes and technology alike must be flexible enough to manage changing situations and to scale. This requires time planning and realistic marshalling of resources.

● Staff should be given the tools to hold a proactive operational stance, anticipating business and customer requirements and looking at the triggers of possible disruptions.

Operational maturity becomes a veritable revolutionization of business operations. Operational staff aren’t caught up with the reactive break-fix grind, they stop faults before they happen and pour time into innovation. The efficiencies gained from this foundational layer impact the whole business structure built on top. There will be an impact at all levels. At the most basic level, those managing the technology stack and on whom the forward progress of the business relies, will stay in their roles, and lend much-needed stability as we enter a time of economic challenge.