Mahatma Gandhi once stated-

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization

Increasing your workplace diversity is not just a hollow catchphrase but also is the need of the hour for good business. According to McKinsey research conducted on 366 public companies, companies in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity, were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, while those for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.

Today, diversity has become one of the most essential business practices and is not just adopted but engrained in cultures of all successful organizations. Collaboration between individuals from distinct educational backgrounds, professions, skills, personas, gender, race, ethnicity, religions, and geographical regions, enhances value of business decisions in terms of, understanding and decision-making.

Diversity produces creative thinking and leads to organic innovation.  This assists organizations in enhancing company culture, building brand value, nurturing diverse problem-solving skills, and maximizing employee engagement.

In fact, Diversity is reaching to a new dimension where many organizations are exploring diversity beyond the backgrounds, skills, gender and race but of the personas mix within their teams, personas mix such as Idealist, Critical Thinker, Realist and Critic, have also proven as a successful strategy to achieve greater performance and resulted higher job satisfaction rate with enhanced trust among the employees.

Here are a few interesting facts due to a diverse workforce, organizations have observed

Innovation Revenue than others

 Higher Team Productivity 

Job Satisfaction and Employee Retention

For a smarter functioning, variety in thinking ways and ideas are necessary.  Professionals working in a team built on different cultures and ideologies, have proven to find best possible way to excel at assignments addressed to them. This allows organizations to deliver world-class products or services to its customers and fosters an environment that encourages best-in-class innovation. According to Harvard Business Review, varied teams can also result in better problem-solving and decision-making. The more differences a team has in opinions, and perspectives, Higher is the experience shared.The ability to approach problems from several angles and ideate a solution is the root of every innovation. Furthermore, being disparate at work boosts employee engagement and morale, which is one of its main advantages. Even on its own, workforce diversity can induce higher productivity and resilience. Moreover, hiring a diverse workforce can help organisations to stand out and results in a stable clientele.

The diverse nature enables in understanding clients’ requirements in detail from numerous perspectives and can channel marketing and sales effort towards audiences with diverse cultures, practices, and backgrounds.

Empowering people with different personas, abilities, experience, language, and nationality, adds a powerful essence to organizational work ethics, culture, team integrity and productivity. Diverse workforce has become one of the highest rated critical success factors for organizations that are striving to minimize employee attrition rate, land large customers, increase workforce productivity and expand revenue portfolio. IGS believes in embracing diversity and takes it as one of its core values.

HOW QUALITY OF IMPLEMENTATION MATTERS?

Domains such as Banking, Media & Entertainment, Healthcare and Telecom, produce massive volumes and diversity of prolific data and insights of which are key drivers for vast revenues for companies, particularly for those who are on their Digital transformation journey. Today’s businesses are willing to target their marketing to particular people or groups that are aligned with their interests in order to gain end users’ attention without using the conventional push-pull marketing tactics. These strategies are popularly referred as “Intelligent Audience Targeting” (IAT).

Many COTS Solutions and customised user journey analytics are essential to every digital product on market, when it comes to comprehending the end user’s perspective and meeting expectations towards exceptional customer retention and scaled User acquisition. These solutions and platforms provide a clear assessment of how users use products/services and hurdles they face while using them.

Analytics helps businesses understand users behaviour, which can further be used in developing solutions/contents/applications that the customers envision, differentiate and crave for. Furthermore, detailed business insights and information on users’ patterns can define an end-to-end roadmap for client acquisition and business growth.

Recent explosion of M-Tail and OTT platforms in the market demonstrates a sheer picture of how each of the market contenders is making high-end attempts to score over the others in terms of user acquisition and customer retention. There are abundant platforms in these two sectors that have been taking the innovation route to develop strong machine learning use cases to have an AI-driven strategy targeted towards upselling and cross-selling content and commodities to end users. Likewise, AdTech and User Journey Analytics are also shoving adaptive and interactive choices of practicing Ad Revenues and Seamless Quality of Experience that is tailor-made to audience’s preferences.

The team at IGS India, by its years of experience with many such multifaceted implementations on client projects, has identified the most widely used solutions in the Market that M-Tail, Banking, Fintech and OTT industries have been adapting. It has enabled IGS to understand the specifics of such Analytics implementation and thereby develop a comprehensive Quality Engineering approach to assure such Analytics implementation. IGS completely understands the urgency for its customers to effectively implement such dynamic analytics to collect valuable business insights.

This blog gives insights into IGS’s approach and point of view towards ensuring Quality implementation of such analytics solutions across numerous use cases.

How IGS’s Data Analytics Validation Service is helping businesses to grow?

IGS’s data analytics validation solution is built on profound analysis and understanding of various User Actions on the Digital Apps (Web, Mobile, Smart TVs and Connected Devices) that are Event Triggers in relation to flags recorded on the Analytics Dashboard. IGS’s reusable Test Assets are developed for distinct top-rated Analytics solutions such as Google Analytics, DFP, Mixpanel, CleverTap, Conviva, Amplitude, AppsFlyer and many more. Our teams develop precise test scripts that identify and validate expected Events, Event Triggers and Register Values on Analytics Dashboards and Networks that improve the quality of Data logged. Quality of Logging is most essential for the richness of insights rendered by respective Solutions to the Business.

Making Ad Revenues work for our customers

In recent years, we have witnessed a momentous rise in Content publishers and M-Tail companies implementing Analytics solutions for Ad Targeting for Smart Upsells and Cross-Sells on Digital Platforms. Many of them implement Double Click for Publishing (DFP) Solutions, AdRolls and Google Analytics towards generating Ad Revenues by targeting to certain groups of customers. IGS understands the KRA of companies in terms of the X Growth targeted by implanting certain solutions for contents or catalogues that generate the highest user visit and impression.

While creating impression for an ad, Ad-analytics reports include real-time data on user actions (Ad Banner Impressions, Ad-skip, Ad-play, navigate to URL). It assists businesses in determining effectiveness of their marketing channels and develop effective campaign strategies according to that. Our ad-analytics testing help businesses in getting a detailed insight into performance of their ad campaigns. Furthermore, it considers, Audience Targeting through Demography, Geography, and Gender. It also validates if ads are reaching the target audience. Advertising analytics helps businesses in identifying what actions users perform on website post-navigating to website homepage through ad campaigns.

Our Test Automation solution (UTAF), built on open-source stack can record several vitals of Ads such as Ad Triggers, Ad-Banner displays, Ad Impressions by Quartile and timestamps for targeted Catalogue or content from the Network interaction logs and validate them against the solution dashboard to confirm data integrity and insights. Likewise, Ad event validations are done for various scenarios such as playing media & trigger ads in front end, while also validating the events & their properties using different tools like- Charles Proxy, Fiddler, and Wireshark.

Our automated Ad Validation has helped a growing OTT platform in driving up Ad Revenues by 3X as a virtue of the robustness and accuracy of AdTech implementation on its platform infused by the solutions’ capability to test more in less time.

To know more about analytical testing, please visit www.igsindia.net

Assuring Quality towards implementing User Journey analytics

The Quality of Experience or more colloquially to video viewing experience, is one of the major factors that influence user adaptation to digital platforms. An analytical survey states that a person spends at least 3.5 hours every day interacting with different apps on mobile or smart devices. This produces deep insights for companies to drive strategies for pushing end users for longer interactions.

There are millions of user actions trigged within an application daily across different demography and geography. Those actions are assembled, stored, and analysed to improve the User Experience. Our user journey analytics validations focus on event validations that create appropriate flags on Data Visualization platforms. The team creates reference Vital Parameter checklist called Cam Sheets, which typically record various tags implemented for various user actions, and their associated values that need to be registered in the network log. Validations against the vitals such as the Data Type of the vital, mandatory, or non-mandatory fields, accuracy of the value captured and whether a Vital can be null or non-null are fundamentals to validate the robustness of implementing the Analytic tags.

Since these validations are laborious and time-consuming, we have developed utilities to run these validations, which are driven by a polyglot tool developed using Java and Python. The utility captures various transactions, user triggers and respective values from the network log and is matched against values registered on Analytics dashboard. The validations include Event Counts, Timestamps, and values against critical parameters. Crash Analytics tags are validated using test harnesses that drive chaos into the scenario by injecting crashes artificially into a user journey. The vitals are validated if any Crash on the device of usage is successfully registered with the required history of the user journey and relevant logs.

Our flagship OTT customers faced challenges with their releases, which were caused due to showstoppers on incorrect reporting of analytics. Multiple events and duplicate events were originating from more than one entry point tagged to a user action. Validating each scenario across all entry points of an event and its properties was an extremely manual time-consuming activity. These drastically increased the testing TAT for the targeted release. Our indigenous test automation framework solution automated testing of User Journeys and cut Analytics regression TAT by 60%.

When a group of professionals equipped with diverse competitive skills join hands and work on a project, an integrated team is formed. This not only unitizes client and partner teams but also improvises coordination between both teams. Additionally, client and partner teams will be exposed to each other’s work culture and ethics, which will help in understanding business operations, quality expectations and lead to faster project deliveries.

The concept of integrated teams is becoming an extensive choice among different businesses following agile software development model. In scenarios where the business is expecting the delivery really quick, it chooses an integrated team model. It helps them in acquiring the right workforce for the project.

What is the purpose of integrated teams?  

For clients, who find it bothersome to outsource people for their projects, an integrated team is a prominent solution. It not only provides them with skilled professionals who are most suitable for project requirements but also assists them in achieving solutions they envisioned.

The integrated team’s model can benefit businesses in numerous ways. Let’s have a look at how they can help a business grow:

Accountability

Integrated team model induces complete accountability for project completion. As an integrated team involves both partner’s team and client’s team, the group members effectively distribute work among each other depending on their expertise. It naturally creates a sense of accountability for tasks assignees and promotes on-time delivery. Engagement that is built on trust bestows a plethora of opportunities to partners. Hence, it becomes generic to be liable for their own action.

Communication

Implementation of integrated teams ensures there is zero communication gap. As, both teams are working in the same environment, there is hardly any place for misunderstandings regarding process, requirements, functionalities, project progress, status, or delivery timelines. Furthermore, it becomes easier for clients to track progress, which keeps them unbothered about meeting deadlines and project deliveries.

Deliverables

While working within an integrated team, the teams flourish with better coordination. As both teams work towards the same end goal, it encourages brainstorming for generating fresh ideas to resolve hurdles and make headway toward a quality product. Moreover, as high-skilled professionals are working together, it provides timely deliverables, guarantees the best quality solution and ensures all-around incident support.

Quality

When a fresh client is onboarded, by default 100% commitment is given to delivering the highest quality services within the stipulated time. This is only possible when both teams collaborate and understand the requirement, quality standards, tools & technologies being used.

When a fresh client is onboarded, by default 100% commitment is given to delivering the highest quality services within the stipulated time. This is only possible when both teams collaborate and understand the requirement, quality standards, tools & technologies being used.  When workforce lacks coordination, business faces delivery challenges with respect to quality. This can be overcome by having an integrated team working on projects.

Availability

Highly skilled professionals being available during the time of need, addressing the issue would not be a challenge. It comes with an all-round the clock support. There is testing team, development team, support team, and business development team, all working is a common space making it easy to deliver projects.

Polyglot

Integrated teams are formed with a team of competent professionals, who are experts in their own field. Be it the quality engineering, technical support, software development, graphic designing, or UI development, competent and diversely skilled people working together brings boundless learning opportunities for each other.

Continuous Learning

As cross-skilled people working on the same project, it helps all team members to learn from each other. The client’s team can learn about the technology and tools used in the partner’s space and vice versa. Working in integrated team offers a never-ending learning opportunity among workforce, which is one of the main reasons why integrated teams model/concept is becoming more adaptable and successful.

To conclude, the hasty outbreak of Covid19 has colossally affected everyone and had made us compromise numerous things and working from home is one among them. No doubt it has empowered us to continue our job by being safe within our houses, but also highlighted major issues in businesses’ work culture.

Entire team working remotely, there has been a lack of coordination and time management, which affected project deliveries and has had a huge impact on organizations’ revenue. This can be attributed to companies not practicing an integrated team model.

IGS had previously aced a work culture that was integrated, which helped in its growth during challenging times. IGS was used to various business communication tools like Sococo, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat. This helped IGS in creating 100% online integration with its clients and partners and made it expedient for employees to stay integrated with the client’s teams.

This integrated team practice topped with the versatility of using online communication tools, helped IGS and its clients release products faster into the market.

Recently, we conducted a poll on LinkedIn, to understand views of professionals on what helps build an organization’s brand value. Ethics, ranked #1 followed by Career upliftment, Customer prioritization and Creating a social impact respectively.
Results provided a clear picture on the importance of work ethics among professionals and benefits it adds to brand enhancement. Considering Ethics receiving the highest ranking, we would like to share IGS’s perspective on essence of work ethics.

Let’s analyze the perspectives of the participants and understand the importance and benefits of work ethics:

With work ethics being a necessity as it decides the business values, it becomes imperative for business organizations to follow the essential set of business practices, which can lead them towards achieving their business goals. Practicing work ethics may not show results instantly, but there are certainly long-term benefits. Business ethics are essential not only inside the organization but also in social, cultural and business aspects.
Work ethics can be defined as a set of rules, regulations, and advisories, followed by organizations. Maintaining general work ethics can have numerous advantages, which include- improving brand image and customer acquisition ratio, which leads to customer loyalty and brand recognition.

In view of solidifying an organization’s brand image, we were able to recognize the below characteristics that would help :

The Right way of doing business

Unbiased decision-making is another major component of standardized enterprise-grade work ethics. One must assure that all constituents receive equal service and practice behaviours that is consistent with the standards and principles of the professional association.
While handling any sort of client project, it becomes essential to follow the set of principles. When set of principles are being practiced it becomes easier to manage project deliverables, which results in client satisfaction and ultimately lead to higher client conversion rate.
The basic principle of work ethic, when handling a client project is – Do not promise what you cannot be delivered. When you promise something to the client, it must be handled with utmost care and dedication, any sort of delay/failure of promise can hamper the business reputation. Hence, all organization’s policies and standards should be clearly articulated and broadly disseminated.

Unbiased Behaviour

Principle forms the base of work ethics. It makes organizations unbiased and liable for their actions and introduces a transparent behaviour that aids in establishing a reputation of a loyal brand that is trustworthy to work with.
It helps organizations take the fair decision over taking up client projects, hiring candidates, organizational decision making and most importantly develops a sense of equity in each and every person involved in the process.

Equitable Access

Work ethics are no longer a secondary thing that can be overshadowed in any aspect, instead, it has become a primary etiquette that represents the face of the organization before society.
Equitable access is one of the most crucial components of work ethics. It not only results in employees, and clients feeling valuable towards business but also creates a sense of integrity throughout the process.
It ensures the organization is making fair decisions, that are evolved irrespective of any kind of influence. It eradicates any sense of discrimination based on races, genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, faiths, national origins, impairments, age, economic status, or veteran status and creates equal access to services and opportunities for people.

Compliance with Law of Land

The other major constituent of organizational work ethics is being complied with all the standardized laws. As the business has to deal with clients/customers, there involves the risk of maintaining data privacy, any breach of user data can result in penalties, lawsuits, project loss and can damage the business reputation.
When the business complies with standard rules, regulations and policies, any client body feels secure and considers continuing the contract in a long term. It also improves brand reputation, which is essential to draw prospects.

Confidentiality and Non-Disclosures

In the age of digital India, it is crucial to confirm end-to-end security and confidentiality of clients’/customers’ data. The same goes for employees, job applicants, and service partners.
All personal information regarding their services, programs, background, and resources, must be kept private. If any organization has failed to support this primary cause, the business growth may face challenges.
Hence, we are concluding that starting from maintaining a healthy work environment to leading a proper organizational structure, work ethics represent the authenticity of the brand, which eventually results in brand building and client conversions.
We at IGS believe without work ethics it is difficult to function, it is our workforce and critical work ethics, that make us one of the leading premium global quality engineering teams. Our brand objectives are integrity, innovation, building high-performance teams, leadership, and inclusion, which are backed by our strong work ethics.

Author – Shanthi Rajesh – BFSI Practice Leader

How risk-free is your financial environment?

The latent occurring of risk and its impact is reduced by Risk Management. Risk Management circumscribes the process of identification, analyzing, controlling & reviewing risks to the business. It is imperative for any business to respond to the risks and usually the response takes one of the embodiments such as Acceptance, Avoidance and Mitigation. Organizations that do not have a well-thought out Risk Management Strategy are exposed to financial & reputational losses.

Key pillars of Risk Management:

Assessment: The risks should be proactively assessed by leveraging techniques & controls like threat modeling.

Acceptance: Based on the risk-appetite of an organization informed decisions have to be made with regard to tolerance for risk exposure.

Strategy: A comprehensive strategy should be crafted for prevention & mitigation of risks.

Action: A set of suitable actions have to be performed as per the strategy.

Mitigation: Plans for responding to security breaches have to be established a priori.

The Banking sector and financial institutions are most conducive for various risks and threats. Typically, risks are from Cyber Criminals and vulnerable breaches.

A look at the magnitude of exposure in this sector: On an average, there is an attempted ransomware attack once every 11 seconds! Some of these attacks are resulting in millions of dollars of losses to the banks across the globe, every month.

Magnitude of the risk

Banks carry 91% of the Cyber risks while insurance companies carry 7%. Drilling deeper, among banks, retail banking carries 39% of the total risks and credit cards account for 25%. The associated data breaches could impose huge penalties on the institutions. For example, GDPR perpetrators could charge penalty of up to 4% of the worldwide enterprise revenue.

An Example:

One of the Big Banks in the Asia pacific wanted to reduce the overall cyber risks by having appropriate controls as part of the risk management strategy. Security experts at IGS crafted and implemented a world-class security solution encompassing threat modelling, SCA, SAST, DAST, VAPT, DevSecOps and so on. Also, they automated loan processing system end-to-end with effective security controls. This resulted in reduction of security risks by over 60% along with reduction of loan application processing time by about 75%.

Click here to learn more about IGS security services

Employees are the most significant assets of any growing business. Thus, it’s crucial to invest in upskilling their capabilities in the best way possible.

In my past as a QA manager, I value skill-based certifications as an employee retention and recruitment tool. This has been a vital differentiator in harnessing my in-house teams’ technical and non-technical skills.

While reflecting on my early professional days as a QA lead, certifications have been game-changing, both in technical and non-technical areas. They helped me garner job-specific skills, competency, and confidence. Today as I lead a growing enterprise, I see certifications being pivotal to landing specific clients or projects through collective performance scaling and skill optimization.

Read on to know why more companies turn to skill-based certifications to stay relevant and competent.

Faster Adoption of New Technologies and Improved Problem-Solving Skills

Training and development certifications help employees adopt new technologies, processes, and models sooner. Therefore, I constantly upskill my existing and new workforce in line with the latest agile technologies.

Certification programs offer continued knowledge-sharing and a customized learning path to skilled professionals. By enhancing their current skills and proficiency, employees are equipped with the latest and best problem-solving capabilities at work and outside of it.

Certified training is one workplace paradigm that helps establish the groundwork to flourish in a more demanding working environment.

Boosted Productivity

According to Forbes, combining new technologies with prolific human capital is key to accelerated employee productivity. At IGS, we’ve seen how this essential endeavour can transform business operations, processes, and managerial practices.

Another study by IBM Smarter Workforce revealed that 84 percent of the best-performing employees had undergone certified training in different skill-sets.

Underscoring employee skills with direct knowledge sharing is simplified by skill-based training programs. In my experience as a leader, I believe continuous training should be a part of  any performance-centric company culture for employee productivity and innovative thinking to flourish.

Improved Job Satisfaction and Professional Growth

Professional development and employee training milestones are crucial for employees and employers. Grooming teams to get there is vital. Certification programs have provided a structured way for me to envision my employees’ growth and progress. In addition, with an open-ended approach to platform and cross-domain training, catering to cross-functional requirements is never challenging.

Employee morale and job satisfaction can be boosted with timely knowledge-sharing and skill-based certifications.

Promotes Innovative Thinking and Benchmark Deliverables

Ever wondered what fosters employee creativity and innovation? Consistent training and upskilling of course! New skills contribute to an employee’s operational evolution and enable lateral thinking.

I believe training programs help develop pertinent and complementary skills while closing skill gaps. Additionally, through skill-oriented certifications, emerging talent can undertake diverse projects and maintain benchmark quality.

Enables Business Standardization and Improves Credibility

Conducting frequent certification programs has led my teams to become more competent, flexible, and resilient to disruptions. Especially during the pandemic, we could scale organizational activities and deliver because our teams had a mixed bag of skills to back them. What internal and customer-facing employees could accomplish were:

• Adhere to formal quality standards and industry compliance.
• Leverage the defined industry frameworks for improved employee performance.
• Stay better equipped to demonstrate organizational trust and face value.
• Deliver value through a recognizable commitment to excellence.

Thus, embedding certification programs in employee retention plans is a significant game changer.

In Summary

Certifications empower people to test their knowledge, strengthen their skills and measure their capabilities against benchmarks.

In a nutshell, certifications are professional development anchors or knowledge drivers that.boost employee morale, help employees achieve job satisfaction,and accelerate productivity with quantitative and qualitative benefits.

Companies, on the other hand, can demonstrate value by fostering a certified, competent and change-ready workforce for the digital economy of 2022 and beyond.