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 organisation 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.
Understanding the challenges...
- See our CIO 2008 survey into the attitudes of CIOs towards software quality finds that a surprising number see it as low priority despite the potential risks to the business.
- In our white paper Meeting Strategic IT Challenges Through Improved Software Quality, we argue that there are numerous tangible business benefits as a result of improved software quality.
- See our video whiteboard presentation on the CIO perspective: Competitive Advantage Through Improved Software Quality. A video that will show you how implementing automation need not be expensive, time consuming and cumbersome.
- Read what some of the world's leading Software Testing and Software Quality Analysts have to say about Original Software.
IT Governance and Risk Management
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.
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 organistions 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. Organisations 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 recognise 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.
