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.

The Real Value of Conferences

This month's blog post is by Julia of ASQ Communications and she has come with an apt topic for discussion this month - The Pros and Cons of Conferences.   It is apt because the prestigious 2015 World Conference on Quality and Improvement is going to happen at Nashville, TN from May 4 to May 6, 2015.  In her blog post, Julia asks an important question about the 'value of conferences, meetings and in-person events'.  In her question, the term 'in-person' is key.

In fact, Julia's question is valid and relevant to today's context.  Many organizations and individuals may not prefer to participate in such in-person events or conferences due to the reasons such as - i) it is an expensive affair, due to the travel and registration costs, ii) there are cost-effective ways to participate remotely, for example - through web conferencing, or,  iii) watch video channels or read blogs, for example - YouTube,  as they provide live or delayed telecast of conference proceedings.

To attract more participation in conferences, organizations strive to deliver 'value'.  When individuals perceive a greater value, they tend to participate in-person.  I would like to look at this 'value', from an attendee point of view, and discuss 5 special points that makes conferences unique and effective.

1.  Time and Effort, dedicated - True and effective learning happens when there is dedication. Conferences are those events primarily focused on learning and knowledge sharing.   Since people typically invest their 2 to 4 dedicated days at conferences, they get to learn and share knowledge, or discuss business - to their satisfaction.  This dedication is very unique to conferences and a  real value element that generates satisfaction

2.  The Guest Speakers, those famous personalities - It is always great to see or meet with famous personalities in-person and listen to them.  This is often possible only during conferences.  Conferences with best and famous speakers receive better registration and participation

3.  The Sessions, you get to really learn - Breakout sessions are very important from a learning perspective.  You can ask questions to the presenter only if you participate and interact live.  You also get to listen to others questions which is most often not effective, or even possible, when participating through web conferencing or while watching video channels

4.  Networking, meet human beings - Physical networking and the ability to exchange business cards is only possible in in-person events.  The bonding that one can create while meeting people and spending few days will be long lasting than virtual networking

5.  Entertainment and Fun, those memorable moments - Most conferences are designed with some entertainment and fun aspects.   It is not always serious business.  After a long set of presentations, discussions and breakout sessions, some entertainment and fun really makes the event more memorable for participants.

The forthcoming ASQ World Conference has all the 5 'value' elements discussed above.  Looking forward to meet you there.