Big Ops: Converging Digital Ops Domains and Toolsets
In martech land, it’s been a growing story around RevOps — revenue operations — that connects together marketing ops, sales ops, and customer success ops under one umbrella, often reporting up to a chief revenue officer (CRO) or chief customer officer.
The coalescence of these functions has been driven partly by shared DNA — there’s some similarity in the kinds of work each of these ops teams performs (e.g., automation, analysis, enablement, orchestration, etc.). But the bigger motivation is connecting ops across the end-to-end customer journey, aligning internal processes and instrumentation to deliver better aligned customer experiences.
But RevOps isn’t the only hot ops topic.
The past decade has seen the rise of DevOps — “a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops).” In a cloud world, DevOps is the way that software is deployed. And per Marc Andreessen’s prediction, software has eaten the world. Like salt in a fast food restaurant menu, it’s in everything. As a result, DevOps is everywhere.
Soon, “ops” variations were popping across the organization.
Some ops roles had been around for while and just got a cooler name. IT Ops instead of IT operations. People Ops instead of HR. Business Ops. Finance Ops. Legal Ops. A certain amount of this was just being trendy. (Hey, nothing wrong with that, despite my position in high school to the contrary.) But there was also substance to these shifts, as these rechristened ops teams embraced a new generation of technologies and practices.
Other ops functions emerged as new specialties. Data Ops supporting data science. Analytics Ops as a subset of those capabilities. AI Ops (and ML Ops) adjacent to those, leveraging machine learning for data science and more advanced IT operations.
Around DevOps, related specialties such as Product Ops and Design Ops. In the context of web apps and environments, WebOps. Sec Ops running security across DevOps and IT Ops (and WebOps and Data Ops too).
There are also more specialized ops roles within the marketing and revenue domains: Ad Ops for advertising (in the context of this article, ops for advertisers rather than ops for publishers), Content Ops (closely connected with Web Ops), and Loc Ops for localization, which is often connected into WebOps, DevOps, and Product Ops too. And Partner Ops — or Channel Ops, if you prefer — orchestrating marketing and sales across a company’s ecosystem.
Growth Ops has sometimes been positioned at the intersection of marketing, sales, and customer success.
