Article

Hemanth Yamjala
Hemanth Yamjala 16 October 2020

Components of An Effective Digital Assurance Strategy

The components of a successful digital assurance strategy include devising a program strategy, choosing the right business process model, aligning operational and technology needs, and conducting omnichannel and security testing.

The physical world of business has given way to digital with operating systems, applications, and networks taking centre stage. In fact, the IT infrastructure (along with customer-facing applications and operations) has become a critical component in a business’ success. Its performance, accessibility, security, and usability are what business stakeholders across industry verticals are engaged with.

No wonder digital assurance has become the key concern for businesses to achieve customer engagement and satisfaction, and stay competitive. Hence, delivering business outcomes that satisfy the stakeholders has taken precedence over testing the components of the IT architecture.

The traditional digital QA approaches seem to have failed in bringing about digital transformation for businesses. The failure is mainly in ensuring the delivery of total quality products within time and budget. To get around the scenario and ensure that only quality assured products or services are served, enterprises have turned their attention towards business process assurance.

Digital assurance solutions can help enterprises to fulfil a slew of requirements. These include meeting business objectives, complying with regulatory requirements, aligning the operational and technical elements of digital transformation, and reaching the market quickly without compromising quality. A robust digital testing strategy is important to deliver customer-centric products and enhance the overall user experience.

How Does Digital QA Testing Meet The Business Objectives

Today’s business enterprises are operating in an environment of flux defined by changing customer preferences, rapid technological innovations, and stringent quality compliance requirements. Digital QA testing can help such enterprises to cut through the clutter of the status quo and stay competitive. The highlights of digital assurance are:

  • Meets business objectives by validating the products or services, individual IT features and functionalities, interoperability of business, and end-to-end workflow.
  • Scale capabilities as per business needs by aligning the operational and technology aspects of business.
  • Mapping regulatory policies to ensure quality compliance, minimize risks, and reduce costs.
  • Enhance visibility of the workflow for stakeholders to get insights into quality issues and mitigate them.

What Are The Components of an Effective Digital Assurance Strategy?

To realize digital transformation in its true sense, enterprises should focus on transforming every step of their end-to-end processes rather than the IT widgets. The IT systems should be able to run anytime (and anywhere – remotely) depending on the business requirements rather than facing last-minute hassles and expensive (and time-consuming) workarounds.

Program strategy: Identify the processes that are going to be impacted by implementing digital assurance and testing. These processes should serve as references throughout the value chain. Thereafter, effective sequencing of the testing activities should be finalized to achieve the objectives.

Business process modeling (BPM): Plan or choose a model of digital assurance testing as a reference to create user stories and test cases, track process components, finalize test requirements and objectives, and confirm functional needs. The BPM should create traceability for design, test requirements and components while taking care of mitigating business risks and assuring delivery sequencing. Thereafter, create business scenarios to validate testing and its outcomes.

Align operational and technology needs: This is needed to ensure all components like operations, training, and procedures are fully established and support the business objectives. Enterprises need to check whether their operations and software applications are in sync, roles and responsibilities to conduct digital quality assurance are confirmed, and regulatory mandates are adhered to. Test activities that are critical to ensure the overall performance of the application should be incorporated even if they do not have any technology component. Moreover, the processes chosen should render themselves to be changed at short notice, analyzed, and reused.

Omnichannel testing: Since the software application will be run on various device platforms, browsers, operating systems, and networks, there ought to be a strategy in place to view the user interactions across channels. Also, users, irrespective of their location, should enjoy a similar experience from the software application. Thus, there is a need to focus on both localized and globalized tests.

Security assurance: Security has emerged as the biggest threat for digital enterprises with hackers on the prowl to cause a data breach. This occurs frequently as applications are run on multiple platforms with varying levels of vulnerabilities. So, the digital assurance strategy should take into account the aspect of security testing and focus on measures like encryption, authentication, data validation, and profiling.

Conclusion

When digital transformation is all about enhancing the customer experience, differentiating the brand in the market, and achieving competitiveness, digital assurance becomes critical. It is only through an effective digital assurance strategy that enterprises can stay on course in the highly competitive business landscape. 

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