Kevin Thompson is Tricentis' Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of the Board.
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The pandemic has been one of the largest catalysts of digital business transformation the world has ever seen. Today, the importance of digital initiatives is still increasing, enabling companies to remain competitive with fewer resources even as more economic challenges loom near.
Organizations must focus on innovation, agility and alignment on how to best streamline their business operations so they can optimize the limited resources they have. Today’s teams are operating much leaner with the same level of expectations around speed and quality, all while continuously delivering world-class customer experience and digital engagement across web, mobile and social channels.
So, how do organizations move faster and adapt quicker while also meeting high quality standards, commitments like security and compliance, and customer expectations?
Digital Business Optimization
Digital transformation is not new. The general concept has created a buzz in the industry for several years, with the majority of companies working on the necessary steps to transform into digital-first organizations in fear of being left behind.
As businesses assess the next wave of initiatives and investments that build on the successes of digital transformation, companies must now embark on the next phase of becoming digital-native organizations. This includes innovation strategies to deliver new products and services faster, optimization strategies to run your digital business more cost-effectively and digital experience initiatives to better engage employees, customers and prospects.
These market drivers highlight the need for organizations to leverage their limited resources more efficiently, allowing for greater speed and quality. Let’s look closer at digital business optimization and the trends companies should consider to attain it.
• Confidence In App Delivery: As no-code/low-code applications proliferate and become more complex, testers and developers will need to ensure the quality, performance and scalability of these applications. Testers and developers should be on the lookout for applications that can do it all—from testing custom apps built in-house to business applications and custom workflows built on application platforms—in order to increase confidence in app delivery.
• Streamlined Business Processes: Cloud-based technology can enable better collaboration between business and technical teams, from analysts to developers, testers and operations. This kind of technology creates a “single source of truth” for work items, epics and user stories, and allows for more alignment between these various departments through tight integration with the rest of your tech stack.
• Reporting For Optimization: When a tool has finally been selected, the best way to maximize its potential is to establish a reporting process that analyzes all testing data in one place, across manual and exploratory testing tools, as well as new tools utilizing automation. A new tracking process that demonstrates a tool’s effectiveness and improvements over time can help drive future improvement and optimization.
• Digital Experiences For Improved Customer Engagement: Every time a customer has an extraordinary experience with a vendor, it raises expectations for the entire market. This is great news for vendors until a problem occurs.
In fact, research suggests that customers are much more likely to abandon vendors with a poor online experience and have negative impressions of businesses with slow-loading pages. In other words, slow performance is the new downtime, so technology solutions that prioritize speed and accuracy will improve customer engagement.
High-performing, no-code/low-code, cloud-based technologies are important for business leaders to consider when researching agile digital business solutions. Some examples I recommend are enterprise application platforms like OutSystems, Microsoft, ServiceNow and Salesforce.
They provide out-of-box functionality and can be extended and customized relatively easily with custom code that sits on top of a SaaS platform, maintained and updated by each of these vendors, adding new functionality with each release.
Accelerating Innovation With Continuous Automated Testing
Leaders will find that these high-performing technologies present new ways to run operations more efficiently and meet consumers’ ever-changing expectations. Automated testing can help deliver quality applications, release faster and meet the bottom line as organizations rely on continuous software updates.
Organizations can also stave off major disruptions with continuous automation testing by monitoring and assessing issues in real time, and even stop them before they occur. When organizations focus on speed and quality in the applications they use internally and deliver to customers, their product innovation will soar.
As we come to a crossroads of an economic recession, now is the time for companies to act quickly and be open to innovation as well as new technologies. Digital business optimization is attainable if organizations are serious about continuing to innovate on behalf of their customers despite turbulent times. Technology leaders should take the next step in digital transformation, focusing on optimizing processes and applications to help their teams achieve more with less.
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