Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs – January, 2019

Welcome to January, 2019 edition of Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs.

We plan to explore the subject of Quality Management – Road Ahead to Digital Transformation for the year 2019 by taking up brief, indicative, discussions on the different related issues every month.

We will begin first with The Basics of Digitization, Digitalization and Digital Transformation in our present episode of January, 2019.

Digitization refers to creating a digital representation of physical objects. Computer systems can then use it for various use cases.

Digitalization refers to enabling, improving or transforming business process by leveraging digital technologies and digitized data. That means that digitalization presumes digitization.

Digital transformation is the profound transformation of business activities, competencies, and business models to fully leverage the opportunities of digital technologies..[1]

In other words: Digitizing information makes the data easy to access, making it more efficient than when it was analog. Digitalization of a business process is use of technology to improve or transform it with the aim to generate more revenue and / or to reduce costs. Digital transformation is designing new ways of doing things that generate new sources of value. It is more related to effectiveness. Also, it encompasses all of the enterprise, not just a specific process or function. [2]

The difference between “Digitization”, “Digitalization” and “Digital Transformation” is explained in the chart herebelow:[3]

Digitalization, though, has different meaning to different people. On one hand, J. Scott Brennen and Daniel Kreiss of University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism refer to digitalization as the way in which many domains of social life are restructured around digital communication and media infrastructures. On the other hand, according to Gartner, digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities,

Digital Transformation is not the sum of all the digitalization projects going on in the organization at any given time. In reality, digital transformation requires the organization to deal better with change overall, essentially making change a core competency as the enterprise becomes customer-driven end-to-end.

In the final analysis, therefore, we digitize information, we digitalize processes and roles that make up the operations of a business, and we digitally transform the business and its strategy. Each one is necessary but not sufficient for the next, and most importantly, digitization and digitalization are essentially about technology, but digital transformation is not. Digital transformation is about the customer. [4]

The Digital Transformation of a Business presents enormous opportunities for innovation and competitive advantages, which will require a complete rethinking of the organization: cultural, strategic, technological, operational changes … t will be necessary to respond to the new business models supported by new automated business processes that allow to offer the new offer of products and services to its customers.[5]

Digitization (the conversion), digitalization (the process) and the digital transformation (the effect) therefore accelerate and illuminate the already existing and ongoing horizontal and global processes of change in society.[6]

Layers of Digital Transformation for organizational considerations

In our next episode we will take a closer look at Digital Quality Management.

We will now turn to our regular sections:

For the present episode we have picked up article, Where Most Companies Go Wrong In Digital Transformation @ Competitive Strategy topic of Management Matters Network, by Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of Everest Group ….the mind-set of managing digital transformation as an event, rather than a multi-year journey, is where most companies go wrong. Success requires change in two key aspects: it must be budgeted and managed differently.

We now watch two videos of the ASQ TV, which are relevant to the topic of our discussions during the yea :

• Quality and Technology – This episode talks about how quality and technology can be woven together. Author Sunil Kaushik has found ways to use virtual reality applications to enhance current processes. Bill Hathaway says agile process helps process design keep up with technological advances.

“Virtual Reality for Quality”, Sunil Kumar V. Kaushik, 2017

Full Interview with Bill Hathaway

• Digital Transformation – When we hear terms like Industry 4.0 and Quality 4.0, they may seem too broad for you and your organization to be able to take any specific action. Where do you start? One place to start is by doing what’s called a digital transformation.

Quality Experience Telemetry

Jim L. Smith’s Jim’s Gems posting for December, 2018 is:

1. Pursuit of Customer Satisfaction is not just about what is required to make improvement happen. It is also about the need to be dissatisfied with the status quo, to cause the organization to continuously seek change, and to stimulate the restlessness for the pursuit of improvement…It is part of management’s responsibility to keep the process of the pursuit as simple as possible, to maintain relevancy, and to keep the effort on track. If this doesn’t happen, the organization will likely become confused and improvement efforts fragmented and ineffective.
2. Expectations, in simple terms, are a strong belief that something will happen sometime soon or in the future…However, many people don’t realize that expectations also serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. A self-fulfilling prophecy is an event that, because it is predicted and expected, is therefore more likely to happen, and even caused to happen…Norman Vincent Peale, the late American minister and author famous for his concept of positive thinking, said, “We tend to get what we expect.”

I look forward to receive your inputs / suggestions that can further enrich our discussions on the subject of Digitalization in the Quality Management

Note: The images depicted here above are through courtesy of respective websites who have the copyrights for the respective images.

[1]  What is Digital Transformation, Digitalization, and Digitization –  Amancio Bouza, PhD

[2]  Digital transformation of Procurement : a good abuse of language?

[3]  Digital Business Models and Platform Economy

[4]   Digitization, Digitalization, And Digital Transformation: Confuse Them At Your Peril

[5]  Process Digitalization in Digital Transformation

[6]  Leadership in the Digital Age – a study on the effects of digitalization on top management leadership – Shahyan Khan

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