How to Accelerate Enterprise Digital Transformation

Technology has reshaped the world with Industry 4.0 becoming the norm for global enterprises and entities to adapt, sustain, and stay competitive. Organizations are under unrelenting pressure to transform them and move into the digital realm. In doing so, they aim at achieving a host of outcomes, such as increased productivity, better efficiency, improved quality of products and services, a seamless value chain, responsive customer service, lower cost of operations, and increased revenue. However, achieving enterprise digital transformation quickly is not only about adopting the technology. It also involves initiating agility - delivering speed and change in the value chain and learning with experience. Also, it is about creating a culture that respects change, for unless the people driving the change on the ground are convinced of its positive impact, the result will peter out in no time.

Building a robust digital transformation strategy should incorporate methodologies such as Agile and DevOps where digital QA is built into the value chain. The focus should be to remain competitive and reduce costs by underpinning the digital transformation exercise on enabling technologies and paradigms. The benefits of following a robust enterprise digital transformation are as follows:

·       If a cloud-based system is chosen instead of a legacy system, it would mean reducing the software and infrastructure costs. Also, the IT infrastructure can incorporate features and bug-fixes even from remote locations, anytime and anywhere.

·       Migrating the IT infrastructure to the cloud will not entail a large amount of time and money. By using delivery methodologies and microservices, the task can be managed thereby ensuring better stability and quality across the production pipeline.

·       DevOps can revolutionize the way an organization develops, tests, and delivers software applications frequently and consistently. It will also entail changing the culture of the organization wherein upholding quality will not be the job of a single team but of the whole organization.

Let us discuss how effectively digital transformation services can accelerate the process with minimum investment on time and cost. However, before that let us find out what digital transformation is all about.

What is digital transformation?

In this process, digital technologies and methodologies are used to build new or modify existing value chains, culture, and user-experiences to address the changing market dynamics and user preferences. It is about reimagining or revamping a business and moving it to the digital ecosystem. For example, a bank decides to modernize its digital interface by incorporating Artificial Intelligence-driven chatbots to reduce customer response time.

Areas to be covered in digital business transformation

To ensure the digital transformation solutions meet the objectives of an enterprise, they need to focus on three areas.

Supply chain: Customers might face difficulties in using a product or service and need a prompt response. A culture attuned to working in the traditional method might not be responsive enough or understand the pain points of customers. Whereas, on following the digital transformation implementation exercise employees will be more alert to the needs of business and customers. This will help the supply chain to be seamless, fast, and customer-friendly.

Customer experience: In today’s competitive environment unless an organization’s customer service is prompt and responsive, customers are not likely to come back. Therefore, the key is to deliver a seamless user-experience to the customers to ensure brand loyalty.

Fast and agile operations: With an agile-driven IT architecture, any organization, big or small, can run its operations fast and deliver quality products and services. Besides, when the situation demands, the operations can be scaled up (or down) to meet the requirement. For example, an eCommerce store selling groceries should be able to meet the rising traffic on special occasions like Black Friday Sales, Christmas, and New Year, among others.

How to accelerate enterprise digital transformation?

Redesign your operational area or value pipeline: Follow a DevOps culture where software development and testing take place concurrently while operations play its role in being responsive to customer queries. The focus should be on incorporating test automation or a responsive customer interface like a chatbot to accelerate time-to-market and achieve customer delight.

Manage data to improve decision-making: An organization with siloed, fragmented, insecure, and incomplete data can impact the quality of its decision-making. However, with digital transformation, organizations can create centralized data repositories to ensure quick access to data and promote integration and collaboration within and outside. Also, organizations can invest in AI, ML, and data science to conduct predictive analysis in real-time to generate crucial insights about the market, customer preferences, and competition.

Enhance security: Even if digital transformation has the potential to generate immense business value, it is also subjected to security risks from cybercriminals. Hence, the process should incorporate methodology like DevSecOps to place security at the core of the whole exercise. Organizations can make use of AI, ML, and test automation to detect outliers and glitches in the SDLC and beyond.

Conclusion

Digital quality assurance and testing can help strengthen the digital transformation process by a long measure. By accelerating the process of such transformation, organizations can derive benefits and remain competitive.