The Interconnected Enterprise: When Support Functions Become Operations

Imagine this: It’s a bustling morning at your company’s headquarters. Suddenly, everything grinds to a halt. A cyber attack has crippled your payment systems, leaving customers stranded. Or a supplier’s unexpected failure has disrupted your production line, sending cascading ripples across your entire operation. The immediate fallout? Lost revenue and dissatisfied customers. The longer-term consequence? A harsh realization: your “support systems” are more vital than you ever imagined.

Welcome to the reality of 2025, where the boundaries between “core operations” and “support functions” no longer exist. In this new era, operational capability is inseparable from technological capability. The systems that once merely supported your business have become the lifeblood of your enterprise.

The Invisible Web of Operations

Consider a hospital. Medical procedures are clearly operations - but that's only part of the story. When electronic health records go offline, doctors can't access patient histories. When pharmacy systems fail, critical medications don't reach patients. When central sterilization services break down, all surgeries must stop because there are no sterile instruments available. What you once considered support functions are actually the foundation of patient care. A failure in any of them doesn’t inconvenience—it endangers lives.

Now think about your own organization. How many systems that you’ve labeled “support” are, in reality, mission-critical? In an airline, passenger reservation systems are as vital as the planes themselves. In the energy sector, retail payment platforms underpin customer satisfaction just as much as the refineries that produce the fuel. In manufacturing, supply chain management software dictates whether production lines hum or fall silent.

The truth is this: in an interconnected enterprise, every system, every process, every function that contributes to value creation should be considered operations.

The Domino Effect of Failure

The most devastating risks are not always the ones you see coming. They are the invisible threads that connect your enterprise, turning a single failure into a system-wide collapse. This cascade of failures reveals a fundamental truth about modern enterprises: seemingly independent systems are actually deeply interconnected. What looks like a simple technical glitch can trigger an organizational crisis.

A few months ago, a major North American airline experienced just such a failure. A single cybersecurity incident triggered a chain reaction, disrupting crew scheduling, grounding flights, and leaving passengers stranded. A year earlier, a leading energy company faced a similar reckoning when a network breach crippled its retail operations, forcing customers to pay with cash and halting operations across its value chain.

These incidents remind us of a hard truth: a failure anywhere can cascade everywhere. And without the foresight to anticipate these vulnerabilities, enterprises risk catastrophic disruption. These cascading risks are the reality of our interconnected world. For leaders, the challenge is clear: how do you identify and mitigate these vulnerabilities before they manifest?

The Challenge for Leaders

As a leader, you must now ask yourself: is your organization prepared for this new reality? Have you identified the hidden dependencies within your systems? Are you managing “support functions” with the same rigor and discipline as your core operations?

Operational excellence in 2025 requires more than efficiency—it demands a holistic perspective. Every system, every team, and every process must align with the singular goal of delivering value to your customers. To thrive in this environment, you must view your enterprise not as a collection of silos but as a living, interconnected organism.

Building an Integrated Future

The journey toward this interconnected future begins with a shift in perspective. Stop thinking of operations and technology as separate entities. Instead, embrace their interdependence and manage them as a unified whole.

To explore how your organization can thrive in this new landscape, I invite you to read "The Strategist’s Shadow: The COO as Master of Execution and Unity." There, you’ll discover practical strategies for fostering operational cohesion, convergence, building resilience, and mastering the complexity of today’s interconnected enterprise.

Your enterprise is interconnected — by design or by default. The question for organizations is whether to embrace this reality to strengthen resilience and alignment, or allow disruption to shape the outcome.