Why Digital Transformation Initiatives Should Be Accompanied By Quality Transformation?

With intense competition in the digital world, customer interests seem to have taken centre stage. It is no longer about developing products to suit the business objectives, but to that ensure customers ultimately benefit from them. The increased focus on customer centricity has led businesses to reinvent strategies, realign processes and adopt industry best practices. The objectives of availing digital transformation services have shifted from merely meeting the customer needs to providing the ultimate customer delight. The latter has become synonymous with giving customers the best possible experience. For the aim is to retain the customer base, expand it further and gain the competitive edge.

Businesses adopt digital transformation by streamlining processes and improving products and services to meet customer satisfaction. No matter how robust the methodologies of embracing the digital transformation services may be, industry research has found most of such initiatives to be floundering. The reasons can be laid at the door of misplaced priorities of businesses. In fact, enterprise digital transformation has become much more than creating efficiencies and speeding up processes. The need is to do a fundamental rethink of the business goals and realign the same from the standpoint of the customers. And the best way to address the challenges of digital business transformation is by following quality transformation.

What is quality transformation?

To align the business goals of an enterprise with that of meeting the customers’ expectations, the processes, tools, and paradigms need to be relooked at. To remain competitive, quality is no longer viewed from the standpoint of developers, testers, management, or clients, but from the actual end users. Quality transformation leads to the delivery of risk free value added products to the end users by adopting new age tools and methodologies, streamlining processes, and building an intrinsic quality culture. The goal of quality transformation is not only to achieve excellence in the development of a product alone, but also to carry that forward in testing and actual deployment as well.

Customers should be so convinced of the robust quality of a product that they will not find any reason to look at options. The stated objective can only be achieved through realigning the business processes, methodologies and tools. The culture of total quality management should be developed at all levels of the organization. In fact, the successful implementation of quality transformation can lead businesses to deliver market ready products, provide an enhanced customer experience and create better revenue streams.

Quality transformation can achieve the objectives of digital transformation initiatives in the following ways:

#1 Ensuring the quality of software in embedded technologies

The advent of embedded technologies a la Internet of Things (IoT) has increased the complexity of software. The complexity is so acute that the presence of a small glitch can cause a chain reaction of sorts. For example, a glitch in the software of an aeroplane can put the lives of passengers at peril. With so much at stake, companies developing mission critical software should revamp their QA processes, practices, tools and frameworks.

In fact, the digital business transformation should entail the creation of a quality culture in the organisation. Accordingly, each and every stakeholder should be made responsible for ensuring the quality of software?—?both at the micro and macro levels. It is only by rigorously adhering to the tenets of quality transformation that organizations can build customer trust, earn revenue and achieve growth.

#2 Create glitch free software and ensure security

The possibility of creating glitch prone applications during digital transformation implementation can expose customer data or sensitive business information. Such an exposure can be exploited by fraudsters for malicious purposes causing dire consequences. For example, a faulty banking software can expose the database containing sensitive customer information including credit card details to prying eyes.

The rising number of such security related incidents bears testimony to the inherent risks of digital business transformation. However, the same can be prevented by adopting quality transformation and following new testing methodologies. The focus should be on executing test automation in a CI/CT environment. Thus, when QA testing is followed rigorously across devices, systems, platforms, browsers, and networks, the better would be the chances of eliminating glitches.

#3 Enhanced customer experience

The implementation of digital transformation solutions aim at providing an enhanced customer experience and help businesses gain the competitive advantage. The focus should be to ensure that an application meets the criteria of functionality, performance, usability and security in a real time environment. No wonder, businesses are investing more to revamp their QA mechanism.

Conclusion

In a world increasingly defined by cutting edge technologies of Cloud Computing, IoT, big data, AI, mobility, and smart devices, implementing a digital transformation framework needs quality transformation.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Software Testing Services Company to be appraised at Cmmi-Svc v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also Iso 9001:2015 & Iso 27001:2013 certified.