By: Sameer Satpute, Vice President and Head - Asia Pacific & Japan

According a recent Gartner Report, Australia will spend USD 84.8 billion on devices, data center services, enterprise software, IT services and communication services in 2018, an increase of 2.6% over 2017. Australian business will also accelerate the use of a slew of new or digital technologies to be able to profit from the opportunity that these bring to improve customer experience, improve efficiencies, and develop new products or services. The challenge then, for any CIO is to successfully lead this transformation while ensuring that there is significant ROI from the significant investments being made.

Digital transformation in any business is largely driven by changing consumer expectations. Digitization has disrupted traditional revenue models and opened up new channels for distribution of products and services. However, most of the digital transformation initiatives fail to achieve their goals. Why? Digitization at the cost of quality will never work. Today’s consumer has zero tolerance for a software that fails to function.

Digital Assurance can help organizations realize ROI of their digital spend by assuring the entire digital value chain, right from Digital supply chain to marketing to analytics and digital assets. Digital Assurance is about quality becoming an enabler for transformation to ensure that the desired transformation outcomes are achieved by leveraging Automation, DevOps at scale, Cloud, Mobile and Advanced Data Analytics, while delivering a superlative customer experience.

So let’s look at how Digital Assurance solutions help address two important challenges and deliver a better Return on Investment. One that goes to the heart of the IT Environment to improve efficiency, and another that helps improve the Digital Experience in an effort to increase monetization.

Most organizations, surprisingly even today, do not have a fundamental understanding of their massive environments across various business units and locations. They lack the visibility across their IT landscape (systems, processes, relationships) and supporting IT Operations (application operations, data operations & infrastructure operations). Enterprise IT Intelligence is an important framework for supporting successful IT Transformation. It encompasses the need to intrinsically understand your IT environments, relationships, operations, and automation; using this complete information for ongoing optimization and better IT and decision making. It is important for CIOs and their teams to therefore first assess the maturity of their IT systems, processes and operations, and develop an excellent understanding of their environments before embarking on new transformation programs.

A second challenge that organizations are grappling with, is the rapid growth of digital consumption of services, be it by their customers, partners or employees. Digital channels have become the new face of enterprises, and one of their primary sources of monetization. A number of digital channel initiatives have fallen short, because these programs have used traditional approaches to development and testing to obtain a bug-free and functional software.

With diminishing product differentiation, something that can really act as a potent business driver, is the Digital Consumer Experience Assurance. CIOs, however, must look beyond the functional utility of their channels and at various other dimensions of discover ability, consumer perception, web accessibility, performance, omni-channel, and social share ability. Today, it is possible to measure brainwaves of end users and analyze their perception against visual appeal, thinking and patience. Imagine what companies could do if they knew how consumers were feeling while interacting with them on online channels. With these insights, companies would be able to build user experience right in the development phase and exactly the way their users would want it!