Chief Information Officer

Managing Processes, Practices and Knowledge Resources

Your Goal: As a Chief Information Officer, it is your responsibility to drive innovation and efficiency to help build a smarter organization that will flourish despite intense global competition.

Your Challenge: Deliver better business results, quicker - with less.

In the insights that follow, we explore how, at the CIO level, a mixture of restricted budgets, aggressive timescales and businesses seeking a competitive advantage through new technologies, increases the pressure and risk associated with managing these high profile initiatives.

At Original Software, we understand the challenges that face CIOs. And we've made sure that our solutions can help CIOs initiate dramatic improvements in software quality and business confidence.

 

The Quality Conundrum

Resources, risk, and application time-to-market are often in conflict as information system teams strive to deliver quality applications within their budgetary constraints.

This is the quality conundrum.

Resource

Many groups of people will contribute to the overall quality of an application, but they are all under increasing pressure to enhance their productivity. Development, QA and business staff all need to work more effectively and efficiently. Increasing resources alone will not guarantee reduced risks or shorter timescales.

Risk

Today's business environment means risks sometimes have to be taken to obtain competitive advantage. However unmanaged risks in IS development can have disastrous consequences. Application failures, leading to a loss of external and internal confidence can damage the corporate brand and have a negative effect on the bottom line.

Timely, comprehensive quality assurance is the key contributor to managing risk to the business from application failures.

Time

Senior management rightly expects information systems to fully and rapidly support their business initiatives, and this has had a dramatic effect on acceptable development timescales.

E-commerce and global exposure has exacerbated the problems where development disciplines are now under immense pressure to support this vital route to market.

IT Governance and Risk Management

with fines of millions of dollars being handed out to organizations found guilty of data neglect, is it worth the risk?

 

Part of the CIO's role is to ensure IT compliance and security in an effort to safeguard corporate assets and minimize financial exposure. Failure to secure data or to comply to audits can result in a very public downfall.

Trust Original Software to ensure your test data management and audit tracking are compliant and legal.

Despite these pressures and despite it being illegal in many areas (including the EU), a huge amount of companies are still using live data for testing and training purposes. The reasons are valid enough: it gives a greater sense of reality when carrying out the testing, but with fines of millions of dollars being handed out to organizations found guilty of data neglect, is it worth the risk?

Original Software can help you implement a comprehensive Test Data Management plan that will address the various issues of data confidentiality, data security and audit compliance. As well as other issues such as disk space, data verification and protracted test durations.

TestBench supports Test Data Management with a suite that uniquely controls, tests and manages the data required for effective testing together with the server side effects of the test. Testing on live data is now a thing of the past with the creation of subsets that retain referential integrity, providing a perfect miniature copy of the live environment. Data scrambling and de-sensitivity, along with auto-analysis, data manipulation and extraction reports for auditing means you can be confident your testing processes with be compliant with all your regulatory controls.

Competitive Advantage

With the right solution in place, your IS team will be able to accelerate the time to market and reduce the business risks associated with application failures: downtime, compliance failure, loss of revenue, damage to the brand and a reduction of internal confidence.

Today's business environment means risks sometimes have to be taken to obtain competitive advantage. However, unmanaged risks in IT development can have disastrous consequences. Organizations that fail to take any quality initiatives seriously risk significant loss in revenue as well as irreparable damage to brand image and reputation, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and market share.

Business leaders must recognize this opportunity and instill a passion for high quality software across the entire organization. In short, to deliver improved software quality needs commitment and plan and a process.

This is where software test automation comes into its own.