Rise of the Chief Quality Officer
Jeff Nicholas
Partner & Associate Director at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Global leader in Technology Modernisation & Enterprise Agile
Is this the year for business to start taking quality seriously?
In today's digital world, where businesses are increasingly reliant on software, the importance of quality assurance (QA) has never been greater. The proliferation of digital transactions and interactions exposes organizations to new risks on a daily basis. The complexity of software solutions and myriad interconnections makes even simple systems challenging to fully understand and validate. The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) introduces new risks of accuracy and bias. In the past decade more organizations have in-sourced software development to retain IP and control, but continued to outsource quality assurance as a non-strategic capability with the outsourced-test industry worth over €30b in 2022 and expected to grow at over 7% per year. Now more than ever, enterprises must look at software quality assurance as a systemically critical, strategic capability that is the guardian of organizational security, reputation, and profitability. To create this capability, a new executive role is needed: the Chief Quality Officer (CQO).
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While the engineers get the credit for creating great new products, it is the quality process that allows those products to succeed in the marketplace. The CQO is responsible for quality throughout the organization. For some organizations this is focused on software quality, for others this will also include hardware quality. The quality mandate?starts with pre-production assurance of correctness, stability, scalability, performance, and security. Quality continues in post-production through observability and monitoring to power predictive intervention that prevents disruption of service.
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In addition to quality and availability metrics, the CQO is responsible for reducing cycle-time from development to production. This ensures the balance between quality and speed is maintained. ?An emphasis is placed on automation and applies to all products developed or integrated by the organization. Testing is a natural part of this process and the CQO works with development to define test plans, execute those plans, and analyze test results. The CQO also plays a key role in communicating test results to stakeholders and ensuring that critical defects are fixed before products are released to production. Beyond testing the CQO plays a role in ensuring development standards and practices emphasize building quality in as products are developed. Similarly, overly complex architecture and data flows can quickly lead to quality and scalability issues and the CQO must have a seat at the table in those decisions. Data quality and exponential growth of data volumes in the past decades have led to the creation of the Chief Data Officer (CDO), the CQO is a natural ally of the CDO as they work together to protect the organization.
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In addition to their pre-release responsibilities, the CQO is also responsible for the ongoing health, stability, scalability, performance, and security of all software products in production. This includes monitoring system performance, identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks, and responding to security incidents. The CQO will ensure that monitoring and observability mechanisms are in place across systems to collect the telemetry data needed to proactively identify and even preventatively predict failures
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The CQO is a critical role in any enterprise that relies on software. By ensuring the correctness, stability, scalability, performance, and security, while reducing the delivery lead time of all software products, the CQO can help to improve the customer experience, reduce costs, and increase revenue. This role can be a new position or can be explicit responsibilities included as part of a CTO role. If your enterprise has not yet defined a CQO role, now is the time to consider this important set of responsibilities explicitly.
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Does your organization have a CQO or similar role?
What title is used for the role in your organization?
Quality Manager at Cisiv Ltd
9 个月Great article. Puts Quality into perspective on a higher level for an organisation. Jeff Nicholas thank you for creating and sharing this knowledge ??
Analytics and machine learning professional with 30 years of creating, implementing and managing teams.
11 个月This article is both fascinating and timely, especially as firms start the same journey as algorithmic finance undertook in the early 2000s. Ultimately, most firms realized the necessity for an independent, officer-level individual to be accountable for the distinct risks inherent in deploying AI and machine learning algorithms into production. My co-author, Ben VanVliet, and I penned a book titled "Quality Money Management: Process Engineering and Best Practices for Systematic Trading and Investment" in 2008. In "Quality Money Management," we devised a systematic approach to cultivate a quality-driven culture capable of developing and deploying AI/ml algorithms successfully. Both our book and papers garnered significant acclaim from the trading community, particularly those engaged in implementing high-speed AI and machine learning algorithms. As outlined in our book, developing and testing AI/ml software diverges significantly from traditional software quality testing. It requires a blend of traditional quality skills, with a greater emphasis on reliability (CRE from ASQ.ORG) and risk analysis skills (CRISC from ISACA.ORG), alongside the willingness of the senior person take risks.
Vice President, Sales (Hi-Tech)
11 个月Your article highlights the importance of having a Chief Quality Officer (CQO) to maintain software quality, stressing its significance in the Gen AI age. Shouldn't companies consider appointing a CQO, who would be a responsible guardian of organizational security, reputation, and profitability?
Lead Software Test Engineer | Software Quality | Test Automation | Co-organizer of taqelah | Maintainer of HowTheyTest and PlayPI
11 个月Nice article. Have rarely seen any companies with a chief quality officer role. There are head or director of quality roles though at many places. As far as quality pillars are concerned may I point out that user experience, delight, satisfaction & value generated also makes up a big chunk of a good quality software? That could be worth considering an important pillar under the quality umbrella.