Quality Management for IT : US Organizations

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Describe about the Quality Management for IT for US Organizations.

Answer:

Introduction:

Analysis, measurement and management of knowledge – it depends on how the organization utilizes information to carry on the business process and maintain performance.

Strategic planning – It depends on in what way the organization develops and makes plans to use it in strategic way.

Midway USA is an organization, which is retailer of internet and offers “Just About Everything” for hunting, shooting and outdoors. It is the global leader, in the sector of internet retailing and offers more than 110,000 items to 1.2 million dynamic customers, from greater than 800 providers. They recorded net sales of more than $350 million and employs more than 350 facilities at Columbia. Most of the employees of the company has a strong obsession for outdoor sports, hunting and shooting, which helps them to serve the customers in better way, using their personal experience and knowledge.  As excellence in performance is one of the main criteria for applying for Malcolm Baldrige award, the organization has set its target to be “to best run, most respected business in America, for the benefit of our customers” (https://www.midwayusa.com/, 2016).

How the organization won the award:

In 2015, Midway USA has won the award for second time. In the same field, the organization was honoured in 2009 also.

Midway USA is a leader in the sector of waste recovery as well as management of resources, plastic, pallets, paper, cardboard and metal recycling. In 2008, they substituted Styrofoam packing of peanuts with air pillows that were inflatable, made from plastics which were recycled. Midway USA is literally paperless. Most of their business transactions and marketing jobs are handled digitally and they do not accept any “snail mail”(Ramachandran et al.2016).

Putting the customers at top of the priority list:

For a great business, people should be at the core of the business:

Result depends on efficient process:

A fully implemented, seven-step plan of development procedure sets the target for Midway’s sustainability, high performance and focus on achievement. The procedure starts with evaluation of results based on their performance, and analysis of threats, opportunities, weaknesses and strengths. Results are used to build up operational goals and strategic aims that define Midway USA’s success.  The workforce and budget plan are implemented in such a way that it should ensure that to execute the action plans, resources should be available. Workers  are encouraged to give inventive ideas to improve through Baldrige meetings of departments, business meeting state, roundtables of employees, one-page improvement summaries and process review to the Respective Vice president. Apart from these, they have very effective management of supply chain that has resulted in nearly 83% in product stock rate, which is very difficult to attain in the industry of Midway USA. It also gave an increase in inventory turnover ratio to 7.8 in 2015 from 5.2 in 2014. From 2008 to 2015, the partners and suppliers of Midway USA’s satisfaction rate is near about 94% each year. This rate is far better than the rate achieved by company’s main competitor in the industry, whose rate is 84%.  (McKenna  2013).

2: Award of excellence in United Arab Emirates:

Motivation:

Carried on teamwork on cross functional basis align to fulfil one common goal of more efficient communication and execution.

To include employees from all levels of organization, to improve the quality of documents, to be submitted.

Self-assessment task is to be conducted to improve the initiatives, to reach the target people.

Quality Assessment:

m-Government Service Award:

In May 2013, HH Sheikh Mohammaed introduced the the best service award from m-Government. This award was launched to motivate the government service delivery to public round the clock through smart phones. It includes five categories involving local, federal, international, Arab and one special award to UAE University amounting to AED one million. Yearly submission of the awards has to be made at year end using website only. Actual date of submission and eligibility conditions are published in the website only (Habib, Bhattacharjee and Chowdhury 2014)

Human Development Award of Dubai:    

Dubai Chamber introduced the Human Development Award from Dubai in 2005. It was launched to give recognition and award the human resource programme undertaken by different business associations towards attaining the goal of Human development of Dubai. The goal not only involves creating work prospects for UAE citizens, but also aims to expand their abilities and highlight their role in betterment of future of UAE through proper guidance and training (Capuzzi and Stauffer 2016).

Motivation and quality assessment:

Cactemedia is a full service Dubai based digital company that was established in 2003. They offer strategic, technical and creative skill to carry on business and dominate the digital world. They are specialized in digital segment – from creation of social media to designing of website and commerce. They already have worked with some leading retial and corporate brands in Dubai are always interested to take up unique and challenging projects. They believe in long term relationship with clients and always wanted to invest their energy, resources and time to achieve their client’s goals and unique requirements (https://www.cactimedia.ae/about-us.html, 2016)

Usage of quality improvement tools and enhancement of overall organisational performance through the usage of tools:

Consultation: The moment a client sit in the chair, they are perched bushy-tailed, wide-eyed, attentively and listen to the needs of the client.

Compass: They listen to their client carefully, so that they can get better idea of client’s project size, speed and the direction towards what the things are supposed to be go in and implement methods to know the speed and quality and exactly where to go.

Development and training programme: They believe in bringing in a new aspect by combining consultancy with training. The programme starts with identifying the area where training is required with an employee’s current development plan and responsibilities. All plans are tied to business programmes and mutual works. After understanding the situation of business and currently faced challenges, they build up special modules. Once they learned, the result is assessed based on proprietary structures. On the basis of assessment, intervention modules are developed and provided, making sure that the desired objectives of learning are achieved. Training programme includes customer service, sales training, leadership technology, personal development and functional skills

Customer insight, business insight, competitive insight and informed business decisions: They offer enterprises to help their decision makers with proper information at the time they needed it and in the right content to improve decision-making quality. They helps to maximize the performance of enterprises and replies to threats and opportunities. Their team continuously works to improve the design of enterprise, build a data warehouse and then incorporate them with the delivery tool of information.  Their platform for solutions helps organisations to learn from data very fast, to answer the questions which are faced in the company and to be reactive in copying in changed conditions of business. It enables organizations working directly with the available data, to communicate with data to know more and are able to use the information as never before. Insights are achieved , only when the organization interact with the same sped as they think. Flexibility and responsiveness is built up within the organisation to help them to be alert and to reply to the condition of business they face every day. Their platform handles issues related to organizations and helps to solve uncertain issues too, when needed.  Finesse’s technologies are intuitive and help to bring the best out of the users and innovate in allowing users to get actionable thoughts and adapt to changing atmosphere constantly (https://www.cactimedia.ae/services.html, 2016)

Vision and Mission:

To focus on healthcare, financial services and education, the mainstay of any society.

Investing in development and research sector, this in turn will lead to innovation of technology.

Despite of so many advances made in the sector of technology, industry of software still face the challenges in developing applications of software that needs to meet time limit, quality standards and have limited budget.  In today’s dynamic and complex atmosphere, information technology is very useful and its development is growing continuously, however, there are several challenges that an IT faces to develop the product with with proper methodologies (Kerzner 2013).

As discussed by Buthman, only fixing failures and producing the product does not arise cost, but a high amount of cost is needed to make sure that the product is of good quality. According to the study of the Department of economics, statistical administration and commerce, cost of developing software increased from $82 billion to $149 billion between 1995 and 1999 (Green 2014).

 It is the duty of IT experts to minimise the risk of defects of software at organization level and manage the cost at the same time. Production defect are much more costly to fix and create problems to individual, to organization and it include loss of life too. In spite of continuous defects, experts from IT sector are engaged in continuous process (Colomo-Palacios et al. 2012).

There is wide literature agreement for the problems faced to include quality assurance in every phase of software development life cycle and budget allocation for quality assurance. Although the information system development is examined from multiple views, there is very less knowledge about not inclusion of quality assurance in in the process of software development. Inclusion of quality assurance was not been focussed on to use it as a measure of prevention of errors. Non-inclusion is regarded as an omission, which in turn leads to the project failure (Hwang and Ng 2013).

References:

Certo, S., 2015. Supervision: Concepts and skill-building. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Colomo-Palacios, R., Tovar-Caro, E., García-Crespo, Á. and Gómez-Berbís, J.M., 2012. Identifying technical competences of it professionals: The case of software engineers. Professional Advancements and Management Trends in the IT Sector, 1.

Green, D., 2014. What is quality in higher education?.

Habib, A., Bhattacharjee, M.K. and Chowdhury, D., 2014, November. IT-based Services through UISC: A Framework towards Digital Bangladesh. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia (pp. 45-53). ACM.

https://www.cactimedia.ae/about-us.html. (2016). cactimedia international.

https://www.cactimedia.ae/process.html. (2016). cactimedia international.

Kerzner, H.R., 2013. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Lasrado, F. and Gomiscek, B., 2015. An analysis of UAE Quality Award Winners: A case study.

Peng, X. and Prybutok, V., 2015. Relative effectiveness of the Malcolm Baldrige national quality award categories. International Journal of Production Research, 53(2), pp.629-647.

Rabah, I., 2016. Total Quality Management Meta-Analysis: Founders, Awards Criteria, and Successful versus Failing Cases in Higher Education. Review of European Studies, 8(2), p.38.

Thompson, K.R., Walter, T.J., Benedetto, R.L. and Meyer, M., 2012. It's My Company Too!: How Entangled Companies Move Beyond Employee Engagement for Remarkable Results. Greenleaf Book Group.