The Power of Social Media

The latest IT wave of digital is comprised of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud known as SMAC, in short.  Some of us may wonder about the role of social in digital and it may appear to be an odd man out of S-M-A-C.

The reality is that social cuts across the digital forces - Mobile, Analytics and Cloud.    Let me explain.  We all know that mobile is the user facing entity and the access point.  When multiple users communicate via mobile, it becomes a social platform.  This platform generates a lot of data to help organizations derive analytics for their business intelligence.  The amount of data generated is so huge that it has to be stored on to a cloud data store.  So, social plays an important role as the integration element of SMAC.

Dr. Manu Vora has carefully chosen to write a blog post on "The Gift of Knowledge Transfer through Technology", a relevant topic for today's context.   Dr. Manu's post primarily talks about social collaboration via technologies such as Google Hangout and its direct and indirect benefits.  Based on Dr. Manu's experience, Google Hangout has various benefits. It is free and available to all, can connect a large number of participants, automatically record videos and post them to YouTube, conversations are available for offline reading etc. He has real experience of using social, in his projects, to improve knowledge, communication skills and creativity.   

But I believe that social has more power and I have attempted to list those additional characteristics - The 4Cs: 

a. Conversation - Traditional focus was always on communication - top-down or bottom-up and one-on-one or one-to-many.  With the advent of social, communication has become conversation - multi-directional and many-to-many.  Today when two people converse, many others get to listen, comment and contribute.   Take for example, a post in Facebook.  Many people that belong a network of the original poster can follow and contribute to the post.  Many times, conversations in Facebook get deeper on the topic of the post and also on the reach.  The power of social conversations is immense.

b. Collaboration - With social, task-based workplaces are replaced by collaborative workplaces. Teams collaborate to achieve a particular goal or an objective. The right team members voluntarily join hands with the focus of completion of goals and objectives.  For example, houzz.com is a collaborative way of designing the home.  In the earlier era, tasks were created and assigned to teams to get the work done.  

c. Crowdsourcing -  NASA has recently initiated a crowdsourcing effort to seek inputs on establishing sustained human presence on the planet Mars.  Let us imagine that there was no social concept, then how do you think NASA could carry out such an exercise.  Through crowdsourcing, organizations are able to perform huge tasks quickly and in a cost-effective manner with a strong innovation focus.  In olden days, huge tasks were always a challenge and many times impossible to do or complete.

d. Co-Innovation - The overarching characteristic of social is co-innovation.  Social provides a fantastic platform for everybody to join hands and innovate together.  The social platform can intrinsically motivate people to stay focused, develop novel ideas and also implement them in an efficient manner. Social platform helps in continuous improvement, a key attribute required to ensure quality.

Conversations, Collaboration and Crowdsourcing thus help organizations to Co-innovate leveraging the power of social.      

The Art of Possible

"How Lean Helped Me Travel To Egypt with Just $500" was an interesting blog post from Sunil Kaushik.   I really admired his way of applying quality tools in real-life scenarios such as for his own vacation.

Sharing economy is evolving rapidly in today's world and is also fairly successful.   Innovative businesses such as Uber, AirBnB etc., are revolutionizing the business world with their disruptive ideas that is working well in action.  Newer and unimagined opportunities exist for such innovative companies.

Due to the evolution of high speed network connectivity (mainly internet) and modern high performance consumer devices,  say for example an Apple iPhone, digital have emerged as a fundamental force that can disrupt the business world.  Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) are the foundational digital forces that enable innovations and newer business practices for both businesses and individuals.  Ability to effectively utilize digital in the business world can work wonders.

Sunil could creatively blend the sharing economy with digital and apply quality tools to create and execute a lean travel plan to Egypt for just $500.  His experience is something that looks like a 'not-so-feasible' plan.  The beauty is that he could successfully execute it.  Through this blog, Sunil has demonstrated the Art of Possible.   This was mainly possible by leveraging digital, sharing economy and, importantly, the various quality tools.

The bigger challenge for quality professionals now will be to fine tune existing quality tools or discover newer ones for the digital world of tomorrow.  What do you say?

The Future: Ensure Digital Quality

 'Quality Throughout' is the 2015 Future of Quality Report.  I invite you to download a copy of the same and read it.  Laurel Nelson-Rowe, ASQ Managing Director has written the guest post for this month, where she asks the influential voices bloggers to share their views about this report and "the future of quality" from now on.  

Switch on the time machine to  step back to the year 2007.  One of the key happenings then was the introduction of iPhone, by Apple, that really triggered the birth of business disruption using Digital, especially mobile smartphones.  Companies that embraced Digital technologies survived while many others, that did not, perished. Following the iPhone invention, digital innovations around Cloud computing, Social Media, Big Data and Hadoop, Machine Learning etc., started to appear and eventually gained prominence.  Companies started using Digital as a differentiator  to run and stay ahead in business. 

Today, mobile channel is one of the prominent business channels for many enterprises.  It is responsible for about of 50% total business transactions in many organizations, especially in retail sector.  Smaller companies, that did not have the capability to make heavy investments, could compete with larger corporations by adopting cloud services such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service.  By leveraging commodity infrastructure and high bandwidth network, enterprises obtained the power to derive business intelligence from huge amounts of (big) data such as real-time web click streams, server logs etc., which earlier were ignored.   So, over the last few years, the world for many organizations have changed significantly, due to digital, and that journey is still on.

Quality professionals have a lot of work ahead to devise concepts, processes and tools,  that will ensure high quality, consistent customer experience and care across various channels such as mobile, web, in-store and over-phone.  They also have the responsibility to assure high quality of big data, a major pain point today when dealing with unstructured or semi-structured data.  Security is a key concern for many organizations that want to adopt cloud.  How to ensure high compliance to security guidelines and how to measure and control the same is an issue a quality professional can help address.  In summary, there is a lot of work ahead for a quality professional in the future digital world.

The buzzwords of today and, apparently tomorrow, are "Digital" and "Internet-of-Things (IoT)".  Future of quality will be to assure that everything is alright around Digital. Thus, quality professionals will need to help build the right quality processes, tools, concepts etc., relevant to this new and emerging digital world.