Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

With the recent acceleration of the economic downfall of several industries, the business community is entering an untested playground mined with all sorts of unpredictable threats.

Like IT outsourcing in the past decade, companies today are increasingly outsourcing business processes such as payroll, training, benefits administration, billing, logistics, and human resources. Both IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) are independent of the economic cycle -- companies outsource in bad times to reduce costs, and they outsource in good times to access new markets, compete more successfully, and grow.

As we move forward in the 21st century, the landscape for delivering technical solutions to business continues to change, and the concept of outsourcing IT products and services continues to gain momentum. In fact, more companies are using outsourcing than ever before. Traditional IT outsourcing -- such as product development, application support, and staff augmentation -- is now just another way of doing business.

Table 1 -- Quality criteria used by survey respondents to evaluate and select service providers. (Respondents able to choose more than one category.)

Many studies have been devoted to new requirements devolving from the advent of the Internet Age, particularly the needs to manage fast and constant change and for 24/7 resilience. Yet the role of testing in all this has been strangely neglected. In this Executive Report, we explain why testing strategies also need to change, and how.

IT Industry

The accompanying Executive Report presents the case for a more holistic, enterprise-wide approach to IT testing, contained within an envelope of business risk management.