Is Implementing Digital Transformation an ‘Olympic’ task?

Rio Olympics 2016 enthralled the global audience and brought together a ‘connected’ fervour. Media across the world and across diverse communication platforms was flooded with scores, interesting updates, candid photographs and records of exemplary performances by participants. Whether it was Usain Bolt’s radiant smile, Simone Biles’ spectacular performance or a standing ovation for the Refugee Olympic team, Rio 2016 proved to grow way bigger than a Sports event that touched every individual and every household.

Thanks to the seamless and consistent flow of information from various media channels, online portals, and social media posts, Rio 2016 has helped create the larger canvas of ‘Olympic’ victory for each one of us.

The changing nature of managing, executing, and transmitting international sports events has digitally connected each one of us in terms of ‘information accessibility’.

Creating a connected environment is no less than a herculean task. For instance, one of the major challenges with Olympic Games is to orchestrate the activities of 200,000 employees, addressing 4 billion customers and operating 24×7 in a new country every four years. With all its global appeal, it involves over 15,000 athletes, 30,000 media, and flowing registrations. Most critical is the kind of attention it gets globally, which justifies the overall ‘stress’ factor.

What if the results pouring in from various sources are lost? What if there is an issue in terms of online bookings for a match? These software glitches have no space in an international event that draws high-octane energy from the global viewers.

Disappointing the global audience is just out of question!

A report released by IDC mentions that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) wanted to bring about Digital Transformation with the sole purpose to transform the overall experience of these games into a connected and digitally-enabled holistic experience for the global audience.

Digital Transformation in all possible ways endeavours to digitally enable your customers.

The term Digital Transformation brings a lot of social implications, where the digital needs of the customer drive the transformation process and bring about the required paradigm shift for an organization / event. This exactly determined the focus for Olympic Games this year; the need of the global audience.

Digital transformation process for any business revolves around 2 basic aspects – Customer experience & Customer journey.

From an IT partner’s perspective, what does Digital Transformation for a global sports event imply?

• The core IT infrastructure does not collapse and cannot be a reason for delay in announcement of the results anytime during the games. Importantly, critical information about the results cannot be lost.

• Better flexibility, agility, reliability, scalability with the processes, resulting in overall cost effectiveness.

• Automated transmission of results within seconds across the world and across diverse media platforms.

• 24*7 support for portal that supports the recruitment and training of 70,000 volunteers, and the application that processes lakhs of accreditation passes for the event.

An IT partner is expected to make all this possible in an environment where numerous IT systems integrate and are connected to a virtual system to deliver the desired customer experience. This implies implementation of Cloud, Analytics, Mobility solutions, and Social Media technology to enhance both customer experience and the IT infrastructure supporting the overall action.

When multiple systems need to team up and work peacefully, Integration Testing plays an important role in IT testing and helps achieve major milestones related to delivery on time and on budget. For instance, during the Olympic Games 2016, the IT partner changed its testing approach. Instead of building IT systems at centralized locations and later moving to the host city, the virtual servers were utilized to test the systems centrally and were later deployed digitally to the actual venue.

This resulted in increased availability of time for test systems, boosted flexibility to shift virtual servers between the central location and the host cities rather than shipping them physically. It further improved the availability of testing environments by almost 10%. Synchronously, setting up the Integration Testing Lab at a centralized location led to further cost reduction. This resulted in reducing the dependency on physical infrastructure for ensuring flawless performance.

As known and acknowledged, Mobility solutions in various shapes and sizes have offered a transformed experience to viewers during the recent Games. Billions of connected devices were used to watch real-time events and monitor results. This resulted in increasing demand for ‘over-the-top content’, which triggered the need to partner with local Internet service providers and physical facilities like WiFi. Ultimately, all these arrangements had to get tested for its performance and functionality to provide uninterrupted experience to the receivers.

Apart from the scalability and flexibility factor, Cloud was leveraged to bring cost effectiveness, Analytics were implemented as part of security monitoring, mobility solutions helped deliver event results in real time, and social technology was used to improve the workflow related to collaboration.

All these aspects together enabled Digital Transformation, which was ultimately possible with rigorous testing of systems for seamless integration and smooth functioning.

While testing various aspects for Digital Transformation it is important to collaborate with a strong testing partner who is capable of offering a complete Digital Assurance platform. The testing process can be automated with re-usable assets and set frameworks. So, the comprehensive testing process covers every component in the chain that is meant to bring about Digital Transformation for the business and serve the customer better each time.

Global enterprises of various shapes and sizes have worked with Cigniti experts to automate and transform their business processes and reach out effectively to their end customers. Digital Transformation in the current context implies business transformation, which is possible with a comprehensive test framework. Connect with Cigniti Solutions and revolutionize your testing process for delivering desired customer experience.

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