Business

‘Quality key to beat downturn’

BANGALORE: If you deliver top class products or services, you can weather the current global down turn — because in the information technology business, quality sells, in good times and bad: that was the message industry leaders heard at the National Association of Software and Service Companies’ (Nasscom) annual quality summit which opened here on Wednesday.

The debate whether quality should begin with the product or the process was a non-starter, a panel of chief operating officers (COOs) felt; both were essential components of the final delivery.

Sasken Communication Technologies Chairman Rajeev Modi felt quality was a strategic priority today — and Indian industry was learning to appreciate that the level of expectation varies from one culture to another: the Japanese were known to be extremely demanding — and this helped raise the bar all round. Don’t always look to others for comparisons; in this business, benchmark with yourself, was his advice to startups.

N. Chandrasekharan, COO of TCS and Chairman of Nasscom’s Quality Forum, suggested that quality could mean different things to different elements of an enterprise: from low defect rate to standards compliance to customer satisfaction — so quality cannot be assured just by creating a quality assurance department. “It is every body’s business,” he added.

The summit ends on Thursday and includes sessions on testing; remote infrastructure management; benchmarking; and business process outsourcing challenges.

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