I wrote a post on that topic, ending it by this statement:
Autonomous Governance pertains to how the consensus politics or mechanics of a given blockchain are evolved and managed. And it also pertains to the scope you give for such governance in terms of the resulting actions.
Autonomous Operations might be easier to achieve initially, and it relates to automating via the blockchain some aspect of existing operations, via collaborative decision-making for example. To uncover use cases for this segment, think of the decisions that you currently make that require voting or participative voices from within your organization. You can integrate the recording and enactment of these actions with blockchain-based workflow capabilities.
Regardless of the flavor of autonomy that you’re thinking about injecting into your DAO or even ICO’s, you need to think about the scope of impact for the resulting actions, and more specifically endeavour to simulate how this autonomy might work by running in parallel a non-automated version first.
http://startupmanagement.org/2016/11/26/daos-automating-governance-or-operations/