Quality and Innovation

The fourth industrial revolution is characterized by intelligence: smart, hyperconnected agents deployed in environments where humans and machines cooperate to achieved shared goals — and using data to generate value. Quality 4.0 is the name we give to the pursuit of performance excellence in the midst of this theme of technological progress, which is sometimes referred to as digital transformation.

The characteristics of Quality 4.0 were first described in the 2015 American Society for Quality (ASQ) Future of Quality Report. This study aimed to uncover the key issues related to quality that could be expected to evolve over the next 5 to 10 years. In general, the analysts expected that the new reality would focus not so much on individual interests, but on the health and viability of the entire industrial ecosystem.

Some of the insights from the 2015 ASQ Future of Quality Report were:

• A shifting emphasis from efficiency and effectiveness, to continuous learning and adaptability
• Shifting seams and transitions (boundaries within and between organizations, and how information is shared between the different areas)
• Supply chain omniscience (being able to assess the status of any element of a global supply chain in real time)
• Managing data over the lifetime of the data rather than the organization collecting it

Image Credit: WEF DTI Executive Summary, http://reports.weforum.org/digital-transformation/wp-content/blogs.dir/94/mp/files/pages/files/170328-dti-executive-summary-slideshare.pdf (Slide 6)

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has also been keenly interested in these changes for the past decade. In 2015, they launched a Digital Transformation Initiative (DTI) to coordinate research to help anticipate the impacts of these changes on business and society. They recognize that we’ve been actively experiencing digital transformation since the emergence of digital computing in the 1950’s:

Because the cost of enabling technologies has decreased so much over the past decade, it’s now possible for organizations to begin making them part of their digital strategy. In general, digital transformation reveals that the nature of “organization” is changing, and the nature of “customer” is changing as well. Organizations will no longer be defined solely by their employees and business partners, but also by the customers who participate – without even explicitly being aware of their integral involvement — in ongoing dialogues that shape the evolution of product lines and new services.

New business models will not necessarily rely on ownership, consumption, or centralized production of products or provision of services. The value-based approach will accentuate the importance of trust, transparency, and security, and new technologies (like blockchain) will help us implement and deploy systems to support those changes.