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.

Strategizing your Digital Transformation, the right way

When the world is moving toward all things digital, businesses cannot remain immune to reality. In fact, the mature ones are looking at integrating SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud) technologies in their quest for achieving business transformation. Others are focusing on addressing discrete business issues by integrating singular digital technologies. With digital transformation, businesses are aiming at streamlining their workflow/processes, enhancing productivity, reducing waste, responding quickly to customer feedback, and increasing ROI, among others. However, about 70% of digital business transformation initiatives do not succeed to meet their objectives. So, before understanding why such staggering figures for failure, let us learn about digital transformation.

What is enterprise digital transformation?

It is about transforming all aspects of your business by integrating digital technologies to deliver value to the end-customers. Here, enterprises do not always follow the well-trodden path but innovate and experiment to stay up the competition curve. Digital business transformation may require the legacy systems to be overhauled and migrate all resources to the cloud. It makes any enterprise agile, responsive, and productive. For example, a middle or large enterprise may go for digital transformation implementation by integrating its processes with the ERP software. This way, the management of the enterprise can track the movement of resources across the value chain and respond quickly to any sudden requirement.

To a large extent, digital transformation solutions can deliver the following outcomes.

1.     Better customer experiences: As processes get streamlined and bottlenecks are removed, the inherent glitches present in the product are identified and mitigated quickly. Thus, with a quality product that keeps on improving, customers derive better experiences.

2.     Operational agility: In a robust digital transformation strategy, activities like shift-left testing are introduced in lieu of the traditional waterfall model. As quality testing takes place alongside development, the process agility increases.

3.     Cultural change: Aspects like quality and security are often given short shrift over more pressing issues like faster time to market. However, with the adoption of Agile and DevOps - a result of digital business transformation, the employees across sectors need to change the way they work, especially when it comes to upholding aspects like QA and security in the value chain.

4.     Enabling the workforce: The workforce could work even remotely by accessing the cloud-based resources of the enterprise, anywhere and anytime. This can address issues related to absenteeism, system latency & downtime, or geography.

5.     Integrating digital technology: Arguably the core requirement of any digital transformation consulting, integrating advanced digital technologies can make the IT architecture agile, secure, and seamless.

To drive a digital transformation strategy successfully and achieve the desired outcomes, enterprises can follow this process.

1.     As per business needs: Businesses can implement transformation depending on a host of factors. These include changing customer preferences, market trends, business forecasts, automation, Capex, the advent of technologies, or rising operational costs, among others. It is important to understand your specific business needs as the journey can entail massive changes and disruptions. So, before opting for transformation, businesses should be clear about their destination lest they end up getting stuck.

2.     Identify the risks: Any digital transformation initiative can involve risks, which if not factored into the scheme of things, can leave an enterprise high and dry. These risks should be properly documented and tracked over a period of time.

3.     Know the requirements: It is important to involve all stakeholders in the digital transformation process and be realistic about the outcomes. Some of the considerations can include:

·       The destination of data and information: in-house, cloud, or a combination of both

·       Risk management implications

·       Technology requirements such as mobility solutions, cloud, or AI and ML, among others

Importantly, if the digital transformation strategy is too radical to implement and takes the users away from their comfort zone, it may create a fair share of challenges.

4.     Pilot testing: Once the risks are documented and the process thoroughly analyzed, a pilot test run should be conducted. This can give a fair idea of the type of challenges or qualitative changes brought about by the transformation exercise. Also, any issue with pilot testing will not impact the whole value chain but a small ‘manageable’ segment.

Conclusion

Developing a strategy for business transformation through digital technologies and initiating a culture change should not be complex or time-consuming to implement. The focus should ultimately rest on fulfilling your business goals and addressing your challenges.

Role of Cloud in your Digital Transformation Journey

In our technology-driven times, organizations that do not have an online presence risks going obsolete or lose credibility. Going digital has become a necessity for enterprises to remain viable, provide good customer experiences, and stay up the competition curve. Since success is generally measured in terms of customer experience, digital transformation becomes a key business requirement. And among the many proven technologies driving digital transformation and offering great customer experiences subsequently is cloud computing. This technology enables enterprises to have robust vision for the future, accelerate digital transformation services, and provide better experiences to the customers.

Businesses have begun to realize the inevitability and benefits of going the cloud way. In a technology-driven world with growing competition, the focus is on garnering transformational benefits rather than settling for the incremental ones. To achieve this, businesses require to set up a robust technology infrastructure. However, for any enterprise digital transformation initiative, the focus should be on remaining flexible and embracing the industry trends.

What is cloud computing?

The process involves the storage, maintenance, management, analytics, processing, and security of data by leveraging a network of internet-based servers. It is in sharp contrast to the data stored on a personal computer or a local server. The distributed storage and management of data help enterprises to make more informed and accurate decisions. Further, this helps them to improve productivity, streamline processes, save costs, innovate, accelerate time to market, enhance customer experiences, and achieve ROI.

Types of cloud computing

The cloud consists of three types of services viz., Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). In SaaS, a third-party cloud provider hosts software applications and delivers them on demand to customers over the World Wide Web. Some examples of SaaS are Google Apps, Dropbox, Salesforce, BigCommerce, MailChimp, Hubspot, and DocuSign, among others.

In PaaS, the third-party provider delivers software and hardware tools, operating environments, database, or computing platforms that are needed to develop applications, over the internet. The examples include Windows Azure, Force.com, Apache Stratos, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Heroku, among others.

Similarly, in IaaS, a third-party vendor offers access to computing resources viz., storage, data centre space, security, scaling, network components, or servers, among others. The examples include Linode, DigitalOcean, and Rackspace, among others.

How the cloud can play a role in digital business transformation

To disrupt the status quo and stay competitive, enterprises embrace digital transformation services wherein they need to upgrade their legacy IT infrastructure. Also, to enable digital disruption, enterprises, besides streamlining their business processes, need to leverage advanced technologies. These include Augmented Reality, AI and ML, Big Data Analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT), among others. Since these technologies demand heavy computer power and storage space, cloud computing comes as a savior. The benefits to be accrued from cloud during the digital transformation process are as follows:

Flexibility: To ensure the success of any digital transformation strategy, the business processes of enterprises can be changed many times. The cloud allows any organization to save costs by not investing in setting up and maintaining costly IT resources in-house such as software or hardware. This way the organization can remain flexible and agile as it can leverage cloud-based resources based on its requirements. For example, if a project needs greater computing and storage power, the organization can scale up its on-demand cloud requirement by paying an extra amount. The reverse can also hold true leading to the optimization of resources and cost savings.

Security: Any information stored in-house can be vulnerable to situations like security breaches, unexpected system downtime, and natural or man-made disasters. Since all data including backup are contained within a singular IT system, any security-related issue can wipe it clean. On the other hand, cloud hosting can maintain multiple backups of data in a distributed system. So, even if one node gets affected, the data in other nodes can remain unaffected. In cases of big data analysis where big chunks of data are involved, any system failure or security breach can have devastating consequences.

Quick prototyping: Any digital transformation implementation entails continuous innovation, testing, and delivery of products or services. This is where the cloud can help enterprises with platforms to build, test, and deliver/deploy applications bypassing the need for a complex IT architecture. So, if an enterprise builds multiple products, then the cloud platform can allow quick prototyping of such applications, saving cost and time in the process.

Seamless collaboration: Implementing digital transformation solutions would require every stakeholder in the organization to embrace a culture of collaboration. This is congruous to the requirements of DevOps that aim at breaking hierarchies or silos to achieve creativity, quality, innovation, efficiency, and glitch-free delivery. With cloud computing, different teams can work seamlessly in parallel to develop, test, and deliver applications. It allows access to computing resources, anywhere and anytime. Also, the optimal delegation of authority can be assured by controlling the level of user authority.

Cost-effective: Cloud services are highly flexible to user requirements. They offer a scalable model wherein enterprises only pay for services that have been used. Thus, there is no need to set up and maintain a costly IT infrastructure (hardware and software) thereby saving CapEx in the process.

Conclusion

The need to enable digital transformation has become imperative given the cost of setting up and maintaining a robust and functioning IT infrastructure. As business processes become agile with the inclusion of new technologies and the need to uphold greater user experiences, migrating to the cloud environment becomes a necessity. It helps enterprises to bypass the challenges of legacy systems and build-test-deliver quality software applications consistently.

How to ensure Digital Transformation by Testing Transformation

Digital technologies, no matter how complex or challenging for businesses to implement, have been accepted as an inevitable facet of modern times. The examples of hovering drones delivering products, virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa answering customer queries, or smart devices like Google Home or Amazon Echo has become commonplace. The advent of new technologies is a testimony to the growing customer expectations of glitch-free products or services. Enterprises, in order to stay competitive and deliver great customer experiences, are embracing digital transformation in a big way. Accordingly, legacy systems are being replaced or upgraded with newer technologies embracing SMAC (Social media, mobility solutions, Analytics, and Cloud).

As customer experience becomes the catalyst for driving enterprises to invest in competitive solutions for sustainable growth, QA assumes significance. To make digital transformation implementation effective on the ground, the software and systems need to be tested rigorously. This is all the more important as digital transformation services touch the most important aspect of people’s lives. Rigorous QA testing helps in identifying glitches in software and makes it fit for customer acceptance. The success of any digital transformation journey is underpinned on the usage of the right tools, standards, processes, protocols, and methodologies. When the ultimate objective is to deliver a superior customer experience, then QA should be a part of the digital transformation strategy. In fact, enterprises should look at the quality transformation to realize the impact of digital transformation implementation.

Why quality transformation is required to deliver digital transformation?

Quality, as the most critical attribute of a product, can only be ensured if every process or department in an organization enforces it. It calls for implementing a set of protocols and regulations cutting across departments or processes for every transaction or activity. It is important to realize the DevOps outcomes of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery of builds. So, how to achieve quality transformation in the first place?

Achieve a speed of testing through test automation: Since the testing of codes should be for multiple channels, the QA teams should use test automation. The automated test suites can run quick tests by leveraging virtual users to achieve DevOps and Agile goals.

Activate the feedback loop: Silo-driven processes can often be the impediments in giving the right feedback about a product. This leads enterprises to identify any fault later in the SDLC and rendering mitigation, time-consuming and costly. However, by incorporating the shift-left approach where the development and QA teams work in tandem, feedback on glitches can be exchanged fast.

Incorporate AI-driven analytics: Artificial Intelligence has come as a shot in the arm for testers and developers. It analyzes past patterns of data to identify the presence of glitches in processes. This helps in speeding up the QA process and ensuring a seamless CI/CD pipeline. Moreover, when the security of applications has become a critical quality requisite, AI-driven analytics can help in creating robust software.

Let us understand with an example as to why testing transformation is essential to realize the benefits of digital transformation solutions:

A retail chain going for digital transformation implementation to deliver great customer experiences can court trouble if the software contains glitches. This can expose the software to security breaches and the loss of sensitive customer data. If not addressed in time, the same can have implications for the retail chain. These may include the loss of customer trust, inviting regulatory censure or penalties, or class suits from clients/customers.

Implementing the right digital testing strategy

To gain a competitive edge in the market and deliver the right customer experiences, enterprises need to tune into the latest trends. These include big data, mobility services, AI-driven analytics, and cloud services, among others. In fact, QA transformation can help enterprises to adopt new and disruptive technologies.

Digital transformation envisions the adoption and integration of disruptive technologies to provide an omnichannel experience to the customers. However, enterprises face a slew of challenges when embracing such technologies. These are mainly related to the integration of both technologies (new and existing), changing the work culture, and training the workforce, among others. This is where QA transformation can help enterprises to take a gradual approach in managing, measuring, and implementing technologies.

Conclusion

To address the diverse needs and challenges concerning digital transformation, the quality testing process should be changed accordingly. It is only by testing the transformation of processes or workflows that the fruits of digital transformation can be obtained. This encompasses the conduct of rigorous testing across the value chain comprising cloud, web portals, devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks.

This article is originally published on digitaldoughnut.com