Panic is setting in, your heartbeat is quickening, a dreaded initiative has started to come down the pipeline from the Board of Directors. It says, “begin to plan for, adopt and deploy a digital transformation”. I took this statement straight from an annual report of a Financial Institution. Of
course, the BOD is responding to a market demand, albeit a demand that is squishy in its definition.
So, what to do? First, embracing that the digital future is upon us is a good start. It’s here, it’s done, what’s next? Next comes the hard work. Identifying places that can be replaced with a computer sounds much easier than it is. Culturally there will be headwinds. Technically, there’s enough choices that can drive anyone batty. We believe if you take a close look at what people manually do (tasks) you will discover a myriad of places to digitize.
Testing is one of these places. Success in digitizing testing is more about its maintenance than about its creation. While many financial institutions have explored automated testing, and some have already done it, we have found that few think through to the maintenance of that automation. It’s easy to build scripts and utilize tools that can make a computer test a system. It’s hard to continually maintain that automation, day after day, week after week, release after release. But it starts with understanding that testing is a task. Tasks can be automated. The results of those tasks are where humans should get involved. The success of a digital transformation will be more effected by how you maintain it than by how you deploy it.
Finding a partner that can provide both the initial automation and the upkeep and maintenance of that automation ensures that you remain focused on the practical application of digital transformation. Becoming “digital” in that transformation is good, maintaining “digital” is critical.