Operations teams sit at the nexus of the people, processes, and systems that drive revenue. While the ops profession is evolving quickly, there’s no doubt about its necessity and business value. Aligning go-to-market teams pays off.
And while much of that success can be attributed to the grit, technical skills, and ingenuity of ops professionals, they’re missing a key resource to do their jobs to the best of their ability. They lack visibility into how elements of their tech stack interact with each other. That’s why, to continue to maximize the benefits of operations, it’s important to provide ops teams with Change Intelligence.
What is Change Intelligence?
Change Intelligence is total situational awareness of the impacts and dependencies that are necessary to confidently manage complex technology. Change Intelligence solutions guide the art of how to design, implement, and iterate processes that accelerate revenue.
If there’s one thing that’s consistent in the world of operations, it’s change. Between implementing new systems and processes, responding to user requests, and solving critical business problems, ops professionals constantly make changes and improvements that have a wide-ranging impact on the business. Change Intelligence enables them to implement those changes with full knowledge of the downstream impacts.
Without insight into the impacts of change, operations teams fly blind
Unless they built the company’s tech stack and processes from the ground up, it’s impossible for any ops professional to truly know every little intricacy of their organizations’ processes. The fact is, many ops professionals are forced to accept that they have to fly blind when making change. Fear of breaking something is simply part of the job.
But the status quo is costly and threatens to undermine the goal of operations in the first place. Poor data quality wastes 27% of a sales rep’s time. And one-third of analysts spend 40% of their time vetting their data before they can actually analyze it. Poor data quality is a symptom of the issues that plague today’s businesses:
- Data entry errors, often made worse by manual processes and duplication
- Broken automations that force users to create workarounds or miss vital updates
- Relying on a single person and/or poor documentation to know how systems interact
Operations teams must overcome these challenges, and they have the skillset to do it. What they need is insight into how the company’s technology and processes interact. Then, they can confidently evolve the business’ operations and quickly remove barriers to growth.
Change Intelligence makes operations more effective
While we think of operations as being focused on go-to-market teams, their work often impacts finance, HR, and other departments within the business. That breadth of impact is a good thing, “it means that someone has a 10,000-foot view over all of the people, processes, and systems that play a role in driving revenue. Businesses must seize that opportunity, or they risk revenue loss and customer and employee dissatisfaction.”
The challenge is, there’s no single blueprint for successful operations. Due to business growth, go-to-market strategies, customer demands, and market shifts, every business has its own tangled web of systems, processes, and resources. Operations teams must be able to understand that web and how to leverage it to meet business goals. Change Intelligence is key to gaining that understanding.
With Change Intelligence, operations teams can adapt to rapidly shifting business demands, onboard new employees quickly, eliminate single points of failure with their systems knowledge, and reduce the risk of making change. By cutting down the time (and worry) needed to make decisions, they can focus more of their energy on strategic planning, and spend less time putting out fires. And that’s the hallmark of a mature operations organization; it offers the company a competitive advantage, allowing the business to access new value and strategic insights.
Why Change Intelligence is central to what we do at Sonar
We understand what it’s like to manage a complex tech stack without Change Intelligence. Sonar was created when our Co-founder, Brad Smith, made a costly mistake due to poor visibility into how the pieces of the tech stack he managed interacted with each other. He realized that his mistake was just a symptom of a broader problem:
“There are literally thousands of moving pieces and no way to automatically see how they all work together. Sonar shows you exactly how all of your data is connected, and alerts you in real time when it’s changed or if any of your automations break.”
Sonar gives operations professionals total visibility into their tech stack so they can make more strategic decisions. It’s the only tool designed to show the impacts of change, both before and after it’s made, for non-developer users. We empower smart, agile operations teams to deliver more value to their organization in the most efficient way possible.
“Sonar essentially takes operations teams from backpedaling to running sprints.”