With AI, business assurance is more necessary than ever

<p><b>As more businesses transform processes with AI, they also need a new approach to business assurance to ensure these processes are reliable, efficient and compliant. </b></p>

<p>Enterprises across industries are leveraging technology, particularly AI, to reimagine their business processes. But even though the workflows and touchpoints are changing rapidly, the primary goal hasn’t: seamless delivery of products and services to customers.</p> <p>For example, banks still accept deposits and disburse loans, insurers still settle claims, and retailers continue to be the link between wholesalers and small consumers. What has changed is how they perform these activities.</p> <p>This has made business assurance more critical than ever. In the face of rapid change to their workflows and processes, enterprises need to ensure that these modes of delivery are more reliable, efficient and compliant than ever before.</p> <p>At the same time, business assurance itself is undergoing change. In our recent discussions with over 100 client organizations, we have learned that customers now want something different from business assurance. Rather than just ensuring that individual applications are functioning as they should, customers now want an end-to-end, process-centric assurance approach. They also want comprehensive assurance of their core business transactions and compliance with all applicable global and regional regulatory mandates.&nbsp;</p> <p>Here are four ways enterprises can get the business assurance they need.</p> <h5><i>1.</i><span style="font-weight: normal;">&nbsp; &nbsp; Shift from a modular to an end-to-end business assurance approach</span></h5> <p>Business processes are becoming more complex, with touchpoints across multiple applications and channels. As this happens, enterprises need to answer the question, “Does the business process deliver the desired business outcomes?” rather than just, “Does the application work properly?”</p> <p>For example, to assure a loan processing application, businesses need to not only check the calculations and workflows but also ensure timely approvals and disbursements, leading to customer experience enhancement.</p> <p>This requires a shift from the traditional application-centric testing approach to a business process-centric approach to validate end-to-end user journeys. Making that shift means moving from functional testing of isolated apps to scenario-based testing that covers real-world workflows, data flows and dependencies, with a focus on business KPIs like speed, accuracy and customer experience. This ensures that an entire business process, from the first customer interaction to delivery of the final outcome, works seamlessly across all integrated systems and channels.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p> <p>We worked with a leading British pharmaceutical and biotechnology company that needed to replace its legacy pharmacovigilance case processing system with a modern COTS product. As this process is directly related to patient safety, the client wanted a thorough validation of the end-to-end process in the new system, as well as integrated quality management system deliverables.</p> <p>Our team designed a robust suite of more than 300 end-to-end scenarios on case processing, reporting and compliance mandates. This ensured effective inventory deduplication, the right user journey coverage and robust validation of acceptance criteria. This led to early detection of more than 250 defects, including a large share of critical and major defects.&nbsp;</p> <h5><i>2.<span style="font-weight: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;"> &nbsp; Leverage AI and automation to scale business assurance efficiently</span></h5> <p>With increasing customer expectations, every enterprise needs to become nimble and hit the market fast. Therefore, it is imperative to have intelligent quality engineering (IQE) at the core of business assurance.&nbsp;</p> <p>IQE enables businesses to leverage AI and automation for lifecycle activities such as test design and orchestration; optimization activities like test suite rationalization and self-healing of scripts; and upstream quality validation of user stories and code quality.&nbsp;</p> <p>This enables faster, more accurate and more cost-effective assurance. For example, we implemented end-to-end automation of point-of-sale barcode scanning for a leading supermarket chain that led to a 40% reduction in the regression cycle window.</p> <h5><i>3.<span style="font-weight: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;"> &nbsp; Align with business goals through an outcome-oriented assurance approach</span></h5> <p>Quality engineers need to understand and be aligned with the business objectives of an IT engagement. While traditional testing metrics cover aspects like automation coverage and defect leakage, these measures do not reveal whether the business objectives of an engagement have been met.&nbsp;</p> <p>For example, a team of quality engineers may be able to deliver very high automation coverage, but the automation suite may not validate the intended business outcome, thus defeating the whole purpose of automation.</p> <p>Instead, quality engineers need to collaborate with business users to define and validate the acceptance criteria in a business outcome-oriented manner. For example, a health insurance company undertaking a claims processing modernization journey may be interested in tracking the improvement in their auto-adjudication rate. Or an e-commerce company undertaking contact centre modernization may want to track the improvement in their Net Promoter Score (NPS).&nbsp;</p> <p>We recently partnered with a large midwestern healthcare payer in the US to perform end-to-end validation for its Medicare Prescription Payment Plan implementation. Nearly 40,000 members were enrolled, and more than 35,000 claims were validated without any instance of negative customer experience.</p> <h5><i>4.</i><span style="font-weight: normal;">&nbsp; &nbsp; Ensure your team has the right domain focus&nbsp;</span></h5> <p>Business assurance is extremely domain-intensive; it necessitates knowledge of complex business processes and regulatory compliance mandates. Therefore, it is very important to have domain experts on the engagement team, working closely with quality engineers to impart their knowledge of processes, products and regulations.</p> <p>For example, testing a real-time payment flow would require knowledge of cut-off times, settlement cycles, chargebacks and exception handling that only domain experts would know. Without this knowledge, quality engineers may validate technical aspects while missing critical financial risks like incorrect ledger postings or regulatory breaches.</p> <p>Similarly, validating the Know Your Customer process for opening a bank account requires knowledge of local and global compliance mandates like the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AML) and Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). Without that knowledge, quality engineers may only check whether the system is capturing the data correctly, not whether the process meets the legal and risk requirements.</p> <h4>Taking business assurance into the future</h4> <p>At the core of next-gen technologies lie real industry use cases that are being reimagined. Therefore, the time is ripe for a new approach to business assurance, one that prompts teams to think beyond technology and build strong domain competence.&nbsp;</p> <p>Complementing technology understanding with knowledge of business processes will be the real game-changer as it will enable robust assurance of strategic transformations across industries.</p> <p>Want to dive deeper into Business Assurance? Read the <a href="https://www.cognizant.com/en\_us/services/documents/business\_assurance\_whitepaper.pdf" title="https://www.cognizant.com/en\_us/services/documents/business\_assurance\_whitepaper.pdf" target="_blank">whitepaper.</a></p>