Digital Transformation Success Demands Digital Assurance: A Manifesto

Digital transformation continues to change the way organizations operate. With an ever-increasing reliance on data, connectivity, and innovative technologies, digital trust remains at the forefront of the global economy. A secure, trusted digital environment correlates with higher levels of digital maturity, as shown in a recent HBR study. Having confidence in data enables business leaders to make decisions they can truly stand behind. 

Quality Testing vs Digital Assurance

Historically, businesses have relied on quality testing and quality assurance (QA) to ensure trust. While these practices are often lumped together, they are quite distinct. With testing, we check if the software is working as intended. Testing is a way to gauge design, capability, and function. Assurance, on the other hand, ensures quality outcomes, meaning that developed software corresponds to specifications. QA is used as a preventative measure during the software development process to prevent bugs. 

As enterprises continue to evolve, user experience and customer satisfaction are key when measuring the success of a business. Therefore, it’s important to move from testing and QA to the practice of digital assurance (DA). It’s not a complete abandonment of testing or QA, but rather an approach that builds on their techniques; assessing the business and ensuring smooth interactions between digital ecosystem components.

Accelerating Digital Transformation with Digital Assurance

Digital transformation initiatives are implemented to accomplish certain business goals and digital assurance helps to ensure success of these objectives through testing. However, digital assurance does not exist for the sole purpose of simply assessing projects, but rather it’s about enhancing and driving the perfection of the experience. Delivering a seamless customer experience and remaining competitive within the crowded business landscape are just a couple of reasons behind the push for digital assurance.

With that, businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of a comprehensive digital assurance strategy. Having a digital assurance strategy helps businesses with: 

• Their acceleration efforts in getting to market
• Application performance through the monitoring of server-side and performance issues
• Detection of defects early utilizing aggressive testing across cycles.
• Reliability and availability as security vulnerabilities are exposed using dependency solutions
• Future-proofing of application to guarantee performance, scalability, and resiliency 
• Having a strong digital assurance strategy undoubtedly champions digital transformation initiatives, drives favorable business outcomes, increases business efficiencies, and helps deliver exceptional user experiences—all of which help businesses to thrive within an environment propelled by innovative technologies.

Finding Opportunities through Digital Challenges

The emergence of digital transformation has triggered a seismic shift in priorities for business and IT leaders. The reality facing digital businesses today is that with the benefit of increased business agility comes the pressure to deliver with precision, accuracy, and speed. Digital assurance techniques can be deployed to ensure a digital initiative is working as intended.

For instance, many organizations struggle to connect new solutions to their legacy systems. A digital assurance approach would start by utilizing the specialist test services you would expect in a QA scenario like performance, regression, functional, mobile, compatibility, visual, security, Salesforce, IoT, service virtualization, and wearable testing.

However, these traditional techniques are rarely enough to keep pace with innovation and provide the amount of coverage that is now required. Specialists digital engineering companies can help. Digital engineering specialists are able to further a digital assurance approach with quality engineering to help businesses adjust their software development and delivery processes to achieve consistent quality. They are also capable of expanding test practices to include automation and AI solutions to boost the scale, speed, and accuracy of the whole operation. 

How Customers are Driving Digital Transformation and Assurance

Customers drive digital transformation, and when it comes to user experience, their expectations are indeed high. Businesses have come to the realization that to achieve digital transformation success, it’s on them to deliver seamless customer experiences.

Today’s customers are tech-savvy and are accustomed to instant gratification when it comes to their experiences. Mobile devices, apps, automation, and other technological advances fuel the mindset of the customer. At every point of interaction, whether it be through marketing, sales or customer service, businesses must take a proactive approach to interactions, thus driving the need for digital transformation.

As noted, digital transformation goes the way of digital assurance. As businesses continue to interact with customers, the process needs to be rooted in quality measures that repeatedly test initiatives from inception to deployment. Simply, quality assurance can help ensure a great customer experience. 

Instead of being reactionary to problems, businesses employ practices to help anticipate issues to reduce errors and increase customer satisfaction. One such practice, chaos engineering, is meant to reduce unwanted scenarios and identify failures before progressing to outages. 

Injecting failures in systems allows for the exploration of system resilience and the examination of engineering. With this, engineers can authenticate behaviors early and make necessary adjustments before the problems manifest and lead to disruption, which can decrease UX satisfaction.

Improving DX with Digital Assurance

It’s fair to offer up the notion that innovative technologies and digital transformation lead to complexities for many businesses. In order to meet business goals and elevated customer expectations, organizations are increasingly shifting their focus towards digital-centric business models with the goal of achieving digital transformation. But the unfortunate fact of the matter is most businesses will fail. Digital assurance can help. 

Digital assurance helps businesses to accelerate their digital transformations by ensuring success of digital initiatives through testing. Digital assurance can also be applied to elevate customer experience, which is paramount for achieving DX. 

A digital assurance strategy that puts customers at the center of the digital transformation journey is key to future-proofing your business

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