Today the foray of digitization into almost everything disrupts operational models, processes, and business strategies. Amongst this sea of change, the quality of business has to remain constant. Quality generates a business value that assures the organization remains on the growth path. Business Assurance provides organizations with help or support to ensure that things are working as planned, which means that they maintain improved quality and efficiency of all their business processes, ensuring a high caliber of assurance to their customers.
Why Business Assurance
Organizations are now looking further and a lot deeper within their business to understand how emerging trends or new functionalities will affect existing business processes and ensure that the customer has the best experience. For this and many more interlinked activities, there is a need for a system that ensures processes are followed and establishes accountability. That is the real focus of Business Assurance. Any organization adopting digitalization should opt for Business Assurance for end-to-end monitoring. Business Assurance broadly encompasses many factors, ensuring smooth and secure business processes with the required compliance.
Applying Business Assurance
There are multiple facets influencing or defining the scope of Business Assurance. Organizations tend to define the scope as per their experience and expectation in a particular domain. What is to be understood and acknowledged is that business assurance cannot be uniform across organizations and will vary based on critical success factors and critical focus areas.
The first steps in Business Assurance are to set up a robust, practical assurance framework that will control all the anticipated risks while having enough flex in its design to change when required based on functional demand. The Business Assurance framework should be structured to assess the risk in the current business environment, should provide timely and reliable information on the strategic risks, and should be able to escalate the risk by providing a comprehensive view of assurance across the environment. This will present an opportunity to identify gaps in assurance needs that are important to the organization and fill them in a timely, efficient, and effective manner by creating robust and structured tests to address all of the above.
The Need for Business Assurance Testing
To help organizations meet today’s demanding challenges and provide them with an end-to-end solution, there is a need to address quality. If quality is addressed right from the start by adopting all testing best practices looking further than the area under test, there will be many assured benefits for the business as a whole. Time-to-market will be accelerated as fewer defects will pass from phase to phase, leading to more satisfied users and a more significant customer experience. If quality is better, then there will be a reduction in rework costs through early defect detection, which could significantly reduce testing costs. Poor testing will drive up the costs, and defects will flow freely through the testing phases and eventually create customer uncertainty, impacting employee efficiency and revenue loss. Complete testing across the landscape is a must to ensure businesses provide the expected quality.
Business assurance is a rigorous, proactive method that puts business success, resiliency, and agility first and technology second. This helps to leverage the organization’s strengths, better develop areas of weakness, and improve the processes and controls embedded within the organization’s decision-making and culture.
At SLK, the emerging business assurance testing capability is characterized by business value mapping with clients and operationalized by advanced capability solutions so that businesses are better positioned to respond to technology disruptions, protecting and even enhancing the brand value through superior customer experience.
