Why is Digital Transformation not successful with many Enterprises

 

The barriers to a successful digital transformation include resistance to change, the prevalence of talent gap and a risk-aversion culture, continuance of old practices, and a silo-driven ecosystem.

Businesses, in order to remain competitive, agile, innovative, secure, and profitable are embracing digital transformation. However, achieving success has often been a pipedream for many given the need to usher in cultural change and upgrade of the legacy systems. It is only a small number of businesses that have successfully managed to reap the benefits of implementing digital business transformation beyond the experimentation phase. So, what has gone wrong for many and succeeded for a few necessitates thorough analysis.

To begin with, enterprises, before embracing digital transformation services, tend to be structured, process-oriented, and ordered. However, to transform them into agile units that are built for adaptation, experimentation, and innovation is squarely difficult.

Unless businesses keep up with the changes in technology, methodologies, customer preferences, and market dynamics, they risk facing obsolescence. Thus, businesses ought to strengthen their customer interfaces like social platforms, mobility solutions, and develop capabilities for innovations in the fields of data sciences, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing, among others. So, even when business leaders are in agreement with the need for embracing enterprise digital transformation, why is it that only a few have implemented it? What are the biggest barriers to a successful digital transformation initiative? Let us find out.

Barriers to a digital transformation approach

Any successful transition can happen when every sinew of the organization works in tandem and towards a single goal. However, where interdepartmental rivalries, silo-driven processes, and a rigid culture to follow the dotted line exist, there can be many barriers to digital transformation implementation.

Resistance to change: Any innovation let alone digital can only succeed if the stakeholders are fully involved in it through active collaboration. They should be able to think out of the box and across hierarchies and silos. However, since most organizations have a rigid culture of hierarchy with delineated boundaries, any collaboration cutting across departments, processes, and functions remains a pipedream. To drive a successful digital transformation implementation, the management should start with defining a digital mindset, create a digital innovation team, and give voice to people in the new digital territory. The management should aim at reducing hierarchies, demolishing silos, and encouraging communication and collaboration.

Culture of risk-aversion: Another barrier to achieving digital business transformation is the prevalence of a risk-aversion culture among the stakeholders. Since initiating transformation in the organization necessitates risk-taking in the form of establishing a new culture, a collaborative ecosystem, and a digital architecture, many are willing to wait and watch. However, unless organizations move with the times and embrace digital transformation in its entirety, they may lose their competitive edge.

Silo driven ecosystem: Traditionally, the processes or functions within an organization are siloed where each one competes for funding and resource mobilization. Such an organizational structure may appear fine at the macro level, the lack of cohesion and collaboration may turn out to be counterproductive at the micro-level. A robust digital transformation strategy envisages the creation of a seamless end-to-end value chain where every function will be accountable for realizing the overall business objectives.

Talent gap: Creating digital transformation solutions needs a blend of technology, people, and processes. Here, employees need to possess skills that are focused on creativity, innovation, and the knowhow for new technologies such as AI, IoT, among others. The talent gap can be filled by upskilling or following a bimodal approach where the latter would include creating a group or team with the necessary skill sets to drive innovation.

Old practices die hard: The digital transformation services cut across silos, hierarchies, and established structures but encourage inter-disciplinary or cross-functional collaboration among teams. However, the well-entrenched practices and workflow arrangements of the past can work against the whole digital initiative. The way forward is to identify the overlapping areas within teams and encourage active collaboration therein. The same can be scaled progressively to cover every function or process within the organization.

Change can be difficult: It is a fact that creating a new digital ecosystem with new platforms, organizational structure and capabilities, and seamless processes can be cost-intensive and time-consuming. Importantly, initiating digital business transformation should not be done quickly and abruptly. Instead, businesses should plan and execute it slowly but steadily. This is of utmost importance as the new digital ecosystem should be able to support continuous change and innovation.

Conclusion

The barriers to driving a successful digital transformation initiative in an organization can be overcome if various stakeholders are in tune with the principles, roadmap, requirements (resources and time), and the associated risks. They need to collectively thrash out the issues and take everyone in the organization into confidence for the proposed change. 

Article Original Source:
https://www.apmdigest.com/biggest-barriers-to-successful-digital-transformation

Perform a Successful Functional Testing of your Mobile App

 

 

A successful mobile app functional testing should include steps such as identifying the testing requirements, preparing a test plan and determining the right cases to automate, considering the right user conditions, and analyzing the test reports.

 The ubiquity of smartphones has brought to the fore the importance of mobile applications in conducting various activities. Among these are paying utility bills, playing games, listening to music, communicating on social media, booking tickets, buying from eCommerce stores, and many others. However, alongside the convenience and ease-of-use facilities offered by these applications, there is also the danger of malware or cybercriminals stealing data and money. Further, in the highly competitive world of mobile apps, the success of such apps depends on the level of user experience they provide. To ensure the same, mobile apps must be subjected to mobile application testing. And among various types of testing, mobile app functional testing remains fundamental to the testing regime.

What is functional testing for mobile apps?

This type of mobile app testing ensures the application addresses the specific requirements and user needs. The test is planned by keeping the end-user perspective in mind and assesses the responsiveness and working of every feature in the application as expected. It holds good for every mobile application – iOS, Android, or Windows and type – Native, Hybrid, and Mobile Web. During any mobile app functional testing exercise, the following questions are generally asked     

• Can the end-user perform this activity? 
•  Are all features of the app working as they were designed to be? 
• Are the features properly integrated to deliver the results?

The mobile app testing strategy to validate the features and functionalities is designed to be conducted for every update of the application. Here, test automation can be adopted to test the basic features. Let us understand how to conduct successful functional testing for mobile apps.

# Identify the testing requirements: The foremost requirement to plan a mobile app testing strategy is to find out the elements needed for the test. These may include the user commands, processes, screens, and integrations that will be part of the testing exercise. Here, inputs from both development and operations teams can be included to understand the requirements and their order of preference. Also, the test team should know the target audience - whether it is the consumer or entrepreneur etc.

# Prepare a test plan: This includes jotting down the scope and objectives of testing, the schedule, and the resources needed to conduct the test. The resources would include test specialists, hardware, and software tools. Thereafter the test team should prioritize the test cases to be developed as not every test is similar in significance. Also, the application functionalities should be verified to check if they meet the business requirements and do not develop issues in case of interruptions. For example, while operating the application should there be any incoming call, the application should go into the background and allow the user to attend to the call. And it is only after attending the call that the application comes to the foreground.

# Test automation: Ideally this should be included in the test plan creation phase. However, its critical importance in the scheme of things needed it to be treated as a separate section. Even though test automation improves the quality of the application and reduces the time-to-market, it should be planned sensibly. For example, there is no need to automate a test just for the heck of it should the same can be done effectively at a lower cost through manual testing. However, from a long term perspective, test automation can accrue significant cost savings should it be planned and executed with the right support.

# Test execution in real user conditions: A mobile user may encounter several conditions while operating the app – out of network, low memory, and high user traffic etc. Hence, such conditions should be considered during mobile application testing wherein various functional requirements are tested.

# Test reporting: The test management tools should be such that they generate suitable error reports in the form of a dashboard. The same should be made available to every stakeholder for the latter to understand and analyze the reports.

Conclusion

With mobile apps becoming a significant part of the users’ digital activities, they should be functional and responsive at all times. To ensure their functionalities meet the user expectations, mobile app functional testing should be conducted by considering all elements, requirements, and conditions. 

 

Original Article Source:

https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/how-to-conduct-successful-functional-testing-for-mobile-apps/