Even if you avoid risks, the current digital landscape is pressuring the existing actors to continuously reinvent their value proposition.
New actors are emerging as unicorns in less than 2 years, creating new markets and disrupting existing ones, including your company.
Quality Engineering is the paradigm constraining the software lifecycle for continuous value delivery to achieve Quality at Speed.
I am now driven by the motto “Quality Engineering or Die Trying”, applying it in my software activities and also naming the QE Unit newsletter that way.
Why living by Quality Engineering or Die Trying
Digitalization is impacting every sector, from retail, manufacturing, finance, agriculture to health, at an accelerated rate.
The pressure to transform will only increase as more and more actors leverage technology to expand their value proposition.
Only actors at the high-standard will survive.
Similarly to the evolution theory, it is not about only being a big actor; the speed at which an organization can continuously adapt is more important.
This change of paradigm can be summarized in the need to capture both economies of scale (as in previous industrial revolution) and economies of speed.
Our digital world depends on software supporting the user experience, internal operations to the collaboration with other companies.
Hence, survival depends on Quality Engineering or Die Trying.
Who needs to follow Quality Engineering or Die Trying
Traditional approach to software production relies on similar mechanisms of the industrial revolution: vertical and siloed functions.
This specialization is necessary as each function becomes more complex (think about DevOps, Data Science), requiring a deep expertise.
The problem is that it makes transversal collaboration harder, slowing down the speed of iterations.
Agile and DevOps contributed to broader collaboration across silos to deliver more value at an accelerated rate.
Quality Engineering is there to reconcile to streamline the software activities for fast feedback loops of value delivery.
Anyone wanting to learn, contribute and share on Quality Engineering is welcome; we need to connect expertises of the entire software value-chain to improve our system.
You are welcome at any level: engineer, QA, QAE, SRE, DevOps, PO, PM at any level of seniority, from CIO, CTO, head of, lead, manager, junior to staff engineer.
What matters is to improve with Quality Engineering.
What to expect from Quality Engineering or Die Trying
Quality Engineering aims to provide actionable content to deliver Quality at Speed through blogs, interviews, ebooks, etc.
Right now the content is not well concentrated, reflecting the lack of transversality and harmonization of our practices.
I am trying to contribute with the QE Unit.
QE Unit is the Quality Engineering Community providing various contents from community sharing.
You can also access:
A weekly update of Quality Engineering with exclusive content crafted, compiled and summarized from various sources;
Early access to private round-table, events, surveys and other community collaboration opportunities;
Co-construction of the Quality Engineering Framework, MAMOS.
You only need to join.
How to live by Quality Engineering or Die Trying
The QE Unit provides a main site concentrating the different contents.
What you can do to live by Quality Engineering:
Follow the QE Unit to get your ebook and get introduced to the community
Retailers are facing stiff competition from online retail giants like Amazon, and traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores are struggling to maintain their relevance.
The technology convergence significantly impacts the future of retail, disrupting what we know today as retail digitalization.
Macro Trends For The Future of Retail
Retail will undergo further consolidation as more retail stores close their doors permanently. We already see retail stores opening up their retail space to other businesses, like stores-within-a-stores.
Traditional retail business models are being rapidly disrupted by technology innovation with automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), leveraging the Cloud and Big Data.
The new wave of converging technology will disrupt that landscape.
More retail brands and channels will disappear, including physical retail outlets, online storefronts, mobile shopping apps, catalogs. New experiences will be available to the upcoming 8 billion worldwide population, living mainly in cities.
The players that will thrive require reinventing their business model, generating value from the technology opportunities and massive amounts of data from their stores, customers, media, products and transactions.
1. Retail Experience will be individually AI-driven
Retailers can already use AI with machine learning to improve customer experiences, recommendations, product offerings, forecast demand and optimize their inventory.
Artificial intelligence aims to automate complex decision-matrices at scales overcoming the power of multiple human brains. It consists of algorithms running on large data sets to produce models that ideally self-improve over time.
While AI is maturing for simpler deployments, Quantum Computing is coming.
Figure 1: The AI process is similar for Cloud and Quantum Computing, just x100 times faster. Google Cloud.
Imagine what you could do if you were 100 times faster with multi-tasking capabilities. Quantum Computing will bring that processing power, unlocking a wave of opportunities for companies to use their data.
A personal AI assistant will know you better than you do, suggesting hyper-personalized products and services based on your personality, activity, ongoing and upcoming life events. Forget the hours of endless scrolling.
You will also let your AI interact on your behalf for buying or contacting customer support with the AI-chatbot of stores, getting to an agreement together for delivering you a present when you will be at home.
2. Retail Operations will be IoT-driven
We start to be familiar with devices in our day-to-day lives. We talk to Alexa, Google Home and our car. This entire fleet of connected devices is constantly collecting data to improve the customer experience and internal operations.
Internet of Things (IoT) will be implemented more widely across retail businesses as technology becomes smaller, cheaper and faster. Retailers will track and react to customer behaviors across all channels (in-store, online, mobile).
These connected devices will disrupt the current retail landscape: “cashier-less stores” with no human vendors, automatically managing reorder, automated warehouse management, or drones delivery.
Additionally, retail operations will improve their efficiency using Robots.
The convergence of AI & Quantum computing will allow retail stores and warehouses to carry out inventory management with much greater accuracy because it can simultaneously store and work with data on a massive scale.
Retailers will leverage entire fleets of Robots supported by decentralized computing— known as Edge computing — to perform intelligent operations on the field.
3. Retail Products Will Be Printed For You
The current retail digitalization focuses on selling existing products and services through web, mobile, and IoT channels. Behind the scenes, transportation and shipping remain a necessity, with the only option to optimize them.
3D Printing will play a role in the retail landscape becoming mainstream. For example, Adidas has announced that they will be using Additive Manufacturing to produce small runs of sneakers on-demand in retail stores.
The challenge of instantaneous printing in stores will replace the one of 24-hour delivery. With the technology maturation and price reduction, the next step is to directly print products at your home, accessing samples if needed.
The supply chain is doomed to a significant shift with fewer products to manufacture, store and ship. It means considerable waste reductions to accelerate the product lifecycle for more user-designed and natively tailored-made products.
End of the struggle when you size between an S and M, or struggle in using an online size guide.
4. Retail Products Will Be Embedded & Adaptive
We have access to a wide range of materials, from clothing in cotton or cashmere to furniture in a whole set of metals, woods, etc. Their common characteristic is to be static: they are made of basic materials and do not change over time.
The rise of 3D Printing with smaller connected IoT devices will accelerate the apparition of new materials and nanotechnology. Businesses will no longer be constrained by the limitations of retail or manufacturing.
New materials mean more flexible and lighter products with reactive capabilities, such as windows with self-cleaning, transports will self-repairing, among other opportunities.
Figure 4: A Polar Team Pro Shift providing sport data, Fashion Retail.
Products will also become more intelligent.
Nanotechnology will accelerate the deployment of sensors in existing and newly created materials. Expect to have a t-shirt with a tailored-made sizing, heart sensor and sweat reduction based on your body composition and activity.
These combined trends will accelerate the rate of new products apparition with a much shorter lifecycle. 3D-printed nanotechnology can be tested and tweaked at the nanoscale level much more quickly than the macroscale.
5. Retail Shops Will Be Augmented Anywhere
We have become used to virtual shopping through web stores or mobile applications. Some of us are also familiar with buying immaterial goods and services like e-gift cards or e-gaming.
Mature Augmented Reality will bring a whole set of increased experiences supported by the increasing number of devices, networks such as 5G & satellites. It will be more than playing Pokemon Go with our phone.
Combined with nanotechnology, AR will accelerate its deployment.
Imagine having access to augmented lenses. When entering a shop, you see additional information displayed over the product you are looking at: its price, materials, 3D Printing time, and AI personalized recommendations.
You can decide to start printing it at your home without talking to any vendors.
When leaving, you discover that you forget to deactivate your “privacy data shield”- too late -the shop already tracked everything you did with all the sensors there. Yes, retailers will use every available data to capture opportunities.
6. Retail Shops Will Be Virtually Immersive
Virtual Reality creates immersive digital worlds leveraging existing computing capabilities and better devices like VR headsets (e.g. Oculus). The advanced simulators once reserved to the army will become mainstream.
Second Life is a game that represents the concept of Metaverse: a virtual world where you can develop an identity with a wide range of activities. The difference is to start creating these worlds as an extension of your life for most people.
Imagine: it’s 7 a.m; you are not motivated to take autonomous transportation to work. You jump in your VR headset right to your virtual office, chat with colleagues until instantly teleport to your first meeting at 8 a.m.
Figure 6: Your virtual office would be similar to this one, Facebook Metaverse.
You decide to call your parents at night with a virtual reality call (i.e. no more Whatsapp calls) and take a break on a distant island. With all the sensors and devices, the experience feels very real. Why even travel so much?
The advent of these virtual worlds creates a whole new space of interactions – virtual shopping malls, brand stores, work – and advertising. You will have other places to look than Google Search, the existing social media and ads on your smartphone.
You will also start buying more virtual and immaterial products; your avatar has more style with these latest branded sneakers.
7. Retail Transactions Will Be Decentralized & Immaterial
Digitalization accelerated the selling of virtual products like ebooks or virtual planners, usually sold by large actors offering a wide range of products, services and payment options.
You don’t want to remove your VR headset to buy a t-shirt for your avatar; you will use the retail shops present in the virtual world. Once you complete the transaction, how can you ensure its integrity and originality from the brand?
Smart contracts is a technology supported by Blockchain for decentralized ledger and trust store. It is a secured record of transactions that will ensure your product origin, validity, and store your payment transaction history.
Talking about payments: forget about your cash and part of your credit cards.
Figure 7: The possibilities of Blockchain with converging technology, Dreamstime.
Blockchain emerged from the development of decentralized currencies (think Bitcoin) as a means of trade without middle-man authorities (i.e. no central banks authority, commissions, power).
This decentralized transactional and trust capacity is powering the development of NFTs (“non-fungible tokens”), creating the Web3 of tomorrow: cryptocurrencies, unique immaterial items, smart contracts for everything.
Retailers will require to support these transactional capacities, offering trusted products and services, and fighting to stay relevant in this more decentralized, individual and virtual world.
What Upcoming Challenges for Retailers?
Converging technology will transform the future of Retail from new customer experiences, automated operations, products, transactions to the reinvention of the supply chain.
It is hard to predict the tipping point of these combined evolutions. Strategic planning performed at various time horizons can help prepare organizations for such changes.
In the short term, companies have to streamline their operations on their unique value proposition, aligning today’s user experience with their business architecture, organization, and technology foundations.
Their transformation must secure a business capability to generate data, connect with partners, and evolve quickly. This always-on connectivity will enable to develop business opportunities supported by the emerging technology convergence.
Retailers have to reflect on their value proposition in the long term and how they can leverage converging technologies. The company’s purpose, offers and values are the most stable foundations in an accelerated and uncertain ecosystem.
Why not start to sell NFTs for virtual clothing of avatars? Which type of existing or new products would make sense in 3D printing? Which ready-to-use AI model can you leverage to make the difference in your customer journey?
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
