Presented by PagerDuty
Work is broken, says PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada. Across industries and departments, today’s employees have become incident responders. Unstructured, unplanned, time-sensitive demands, or what Tejada calls “interrupt work,” are crowding out important business tasks and value-add activities. And even when nothing is on fire, the nature of hybrid work means schedules are irregular and interruptions are almost always a fact of life.
“From customer service to public relations, from legal to HR to revenue organizations, interrupt work now dominates our days,” Tejada says. “Whatever function you operate in, modern work is defined by the need to be ready for anything, and to pivot instantly when the moment calls. But we can’t be held hostage by interrupt work. “
As businesses in every industry shift toward building out digital operations as their backbone, digital knowledge workers are now drowning in stimuli, flooded by massive amounts of data generated across enterprises. They’re awash in the array of tools that turn data into stimuli instead of signals, and they’re hampered by systems that are supposed to prioritize their urgent and important work but can’t keep pace. Traditional work management platforms no longer serve modern knowledge workers and can’t solve the problem of interrupt work.
Building a better management platform
Many work management platforms still rely on humans to identify and prioritize tasks. They interrupt with volume, rather than intelligence. They’ll surface the noisiest or most active issue, whether or not it requires employee intervention to solve – and regardless of the business value of solving it.
Worse yet, this interrupt work is often served via tickets in a queue, rather than grouped in ways that offer actionable insight into underlying problems or root causes. Even when these platforms identify the right issues, it requires toil and saddles users with the mundane work, creating friction instead of empowering innovation. And today’s consumers move too fast for companies to operate on ticket time.
Work today requires an intelligent platform for action, with solutions for detecting, managing and automating real-time work. It must ensure workers are interrupted only when necessary, and otherwise are allowed to focus on innovation and value-creation. It must predict and prevent problems and be adaptable to any function across the business.
“Other platforms lack judgment – they’ll identify the work, but just drop it at your feet to solve the problem. That mode of operations is no longer good enough,” Tejada says. “We wanted to build a platform that makes you ready for anything, adaptable to any function across the business.”
PagerDuty’s leadership in the digital operations management world reflects its goal to build a full operations cloud that tackles the complexity of today’s workflows.
An operations cloud for modern work
“PagerDuty started with developers and with a focus on incident response. But it isn’t just for developers anymore,” Tejada says. “Across industries and functions, it’s the platform for action wherever operations are concerned. The result is improved team health with a better way to manage interrupt work.”
First, it operates in real-time: No tickets, queueing or mass communication blasts to every single person who could possibly be involved in an issue. PagerDuty connects you to everyone in your organization by intelligently assembling the right team to solve a problem when seconds matter.
The platform has nearly 670 integrations used to enable visibility across the organization, automatically detecting work from every corner of the digital stack. It intelligently synthesizes those data inputs to create visibility between teams and dependencies, and issues are routed with a focus on resolving root causes and moving on.
The Service Graph tool provides a holistic map of business and technical service relationships to empower full-service ownership. It segments out areas of the organization that are most meaningful, or most problematic, and directly links the data sources driving them. Customers can create new connections between business and technical services, so that they have comprehensive control over the tech, people, and services that affect business success.
Even then, there’s an unacceptable amount of interrupt work left over, which is why the company integrates automation and AI into the platform to suppress the noise to help employees focus on what matters most.
“The goal, as always, is to free you up to do more fulfilling work, innovating on behalf of your business by filtering out noise,” Tejada says. “We continue to push this forward, using AI to help teams diagnose and act on time-critical issues and opportunities in real-time.”
The decade-plus of proprietary data also means it learns with every event. The longer the platform is integrated into your organization, the more value it provides by understanding your operations better than any other platform.
Looking forward
PagerDuty continues to evolve, focused on product-led growth. As part of that, its acquisitions are aimed at accelerating real-time automation across the platform, to enable responders to diagnose and remediate issues without human intervention, and run automated diagnostics after an incident across multiple teams. Not only do incidents get solved, but the data captured means the platform keeps learning and improving its automation algorithms.
As the company expands to use cases in finance, human resources and supply chain workflows, the goal is to provide intelligent and flexible automation for urgent, unstructured work across the enterprise. With incident workflows, customers can rapidly design and deploy customized automated steps for major incident responses across a variety of use cases.
Out-of-the-box workflows enable consistent response, which is especially useful for new employees who may lack the institutional knowledge to know how your team operates. Learnings from past incidents can be coded back into workflows, making responses smarter, every time.
“The PagerDuty Operations Cloud is designed to orchestrate modern work, elevate modern workers, and empower the modern enterprise,” Tejada says. “Our company vision is to transform critical work so you can delight your customers. That only happens if we give you capabilities that apply across teams in your organization.”
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