Here’s how digital assurance helps ISVs leverage the latest industry trends

Digitalization is rapidly changing how enterprises create value and how they compete. While many independent software vendors (ISVs) are emerging as potential partners in digital transformation, enterprises should look for those who make customer experience a top priority.  

With businesses adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI), cognitive computing, Internet of things (IoT), and other software-driven tools, experience assurance has become a driving force in digital transformation.  

According to George Westerman, Research Scientist with the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy, “When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar.” 

While providing several other competitive advantages such as cloud-ready software and flexible pricing costs, a new breed of ISVs offers these software tools that provide enterprises an opportunity to change industry dynamics, reduce costs, and improve customer experiences. 

It is imperative to stay ahead of industry trends that have the potential to create opportunity and drive significant disruption along the digital business transformation phase. 

Like many other industries, the cloud has significantly transformed the ISV industry. Off late, building and scaling apps on a secure cloud is becoming increasingly critical to customer retention and acquisition. 

The changing market landscape is driving ISVs to undergo a complete digital transformation. But modernizing application development and shifting to cloud comes with several challenges.  

As put forth by Chris Bedi, CIO of Service Now, “The reality is, many digital transformations fail because companies aren’t integrating their business and technology strategies from the start. It’s imperative that CIOs know how to quantify their progress with AI and digitalization technologies and understand how to effectively communicate this value to key stakeholders.” 

ISVs must transform their entire business model to a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model, which means, they need to convert from the traditional delivery packaged software to a subscription-based model that would require frequent releases instead of the yearly upgrades. 

While digital technology is transforming the world, today’s customer’s demand “anything-anytime-anywhere” service with the best experience. A minor glitch in customer experience can cost a fortune to the enterprises, resulting in loss of business. 

By addressing the challenges of performance, security, reliability, and speed, Digital Assurance plays a key role in ensuring that customers enjoy the superior experience they expect.  

When embarking towards digital transformation, one would expect ISVs to use the best quality and assurance practices that will help enterprises enable devices, applications, web, and mobile platforms to interact smoothly within their environment. 

As per Gartner’s latest study – ”88% of service leaders say their current quality assurance processes are ineffective and rarely match up to the customer view of quality and 91% of organizations are engaged in some form of digital initiative.” 

Digital Assurance solutions being implemented should include security aspects, interoperability, performance, and network capability, and exceed the functional validation of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) stack. 

Digital Assurance Framework 

In their journey towards digital transformation, ISVs should ensure that every software they develop goes through a proper digital assurance framework channel. It is imperative to measure progress and the business value it creates. 

Creating an efficient digital assurance framework requires organizations to have access to established processes, checklists, test assets, and proven methodologies for effective validations of all resource files across all connected devices. 

The digital assurance framework will be an amalgamation of digital value chain, analytics, digital ecosystem, and tools & accelerators.  

• Digital Value Chain: Quality assurance across digital marketing, web portals, web content, digital assessment managements and web analytics. 
• Digital Ecosystem: Quality assurance for cloud, mobility, big data, and connected devices. 
• Analytics: Uses social analytics and defect analytics to define assurance strategy. 
• Tools & Accelerators: In-house tools for test data, virtualization, life cycle automation, performance, and security. 

The digital assurance solutions enable ISVs to test their software across multiple devices, channels, platforms, and their internal layers. It will leverage service virtualization to provide a holistic approach for test data management and will expedite the quality assurance efforts.  

The digital assurance solution uses analytics to define the testing approach and has in-built performance, security, and availability parameters. 

Gartner predicts that by 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI and 85% by all other resolution channels. 

To keep up with a more complex world of customer service, enterprises should modernize the way they evaluate their ISVs. Rather than holding ISVs accountable to strict checklists of behaviors, enterprises need to create flexible, competency-based guidance that allows ISVs to deliver personalized customer service. 

Benefits to Business 

• Future Proofing: Ensures performance, scalability, resilience, and security in all applications. 
• Agility in business: Enables Virtualization strategies and extreme automation for faster time to market. 
• Customer Centricity: Ensures seamless customer experience across channels through analytics based digital assurance approach. 
• Stability in business: Detects defects early by testing the shifting left and deploying best in class processes across testing cycles. 
• Performance of Applications: Checks performance issues not only at the server side but also at the front-end, providing a holistic view of the performance of applications. 
• Time to Market: Virtualizes unavailable services using middleware and virtualization solutions, accelerating the time to market. 
• Reliability: Checks for any security vulnerabilities using dependency solutions, ensuring reliability and availability. 
• Accessibility Solutions: Ensures adherence to WCAG standards. 

Enterprises and ISVs across the globe are rapidly adopting digital assurance techniques to help improve operational processes and customer experience. A strong digital assurance framework that will factor in all digital transformation aspects is imperative to the success of any digitalization program. 

Cigniti’s Digital Assurance solutions help ISVs leverage the latest industry trends. The digital assurance framework uses the power of analytics for a scientific approach to regression testing. We automate the complete business processes testing and our Test Data Management solution generates and masks dynamic data for testing. The web automation solutions enable you to use the same scripts to test applications on mobile and web devices. Our quality assurance team can test software components as and when they are built using the component testing framework. 

 Need help? 

Talk to our Digital Assurance experts. They will help you provide a solution for your business and will demonstrate how digital assurance helps ISVs leverage the latest industry trends.