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.