Roy Rada
Virtual University Academic Officer
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-2725
Standards are often about a product but can be about management. The pre-eminent standard in the area of management is the international quality management standard ISO 9000. Such standards are more important to an organization's success than are technical standards. Yet, the vast majority of ISO standards are about specific technical products, such as computer operating systems.
What is ISO 9000? Why is it important? The standard provides a general framework for quality management and is targeted towards manufacturing organizations. The challenge to the organization is to invest in the additional workload of the maintenance of records for monitoring quality in such a way that the profitability of the company is improved.
New standards for quality management are needed which target other sectors than manufacturing. Universities are now striving to improve their competitive position by exploiting information systems but are in need of better quality management. The health care industry is in a similar situation. Might further international standards be developed to guide the quality management of more organizations.
ISO 9000 began in 1979 when the British Standards Institute Technical Committee 176 began the creation of a standard for generic quality principles for manufacturing. This led to the ISO 9000 standard that was finally issued in 1987. ISO 9000 is the most widely known, most widely adopted, and best selling standard of any that ISO has published.
The language and apparent assumptions of ISO 9000 are targeted to the manufacturer. Nevertheless, ISO 9000 is being applied to quality systems of many organizations, whether they be manufacturing or not (Voehl et al, 1994). One theme of this column is that further ISO standards ought to be developed to support quality management.
The term `ISO 9000' is usually used to refer to a set of intimately related standards. One standard is a roadmap for the others. These standards cover quality design, quality management, and quality assurance for different kinds of companies depending on the extent to which they design as well as manufacture products. Another one of the standards covers risks, costs and benefits, management responsibility, quality system principles, and other building blocks that help users customize quality standards to conform to real-life situations. In the rest of this column the term ISO 9000 will be used to refer to this set of quality-related standards.
One way to model the coverage of ISO 9000 is to think of the organization's operating process, its quality records, and its quality control. The operating process creates the final product or service (see Figure 1). The quality records are maintained relative to this process, and the control system corrects for divergences from quality. Quality control is supported by a procedure manual that provides guidance for the implementation of the quality system on a day-to-day basis. The control system must include a means for identifying, collecting, indexing, storing, retrieving, and maintaining quality records. The quality system must help people work to quality. This requires both that the documentation is relevant to the standard and that the behavior of people is relevant to the standard (Huyink and Westover, 1994).
Figure 1: The rectangle in the middle shows the basic process of the company. The quality records that are indicated in the right must reflect each step of the basic process. The quality control is indicated on the left and applies to the quality records relative to the ongoing company process.
ISO 9000 is important in the first instance because it gives organizations some guidance on how to manage for quality. Secondly, mechanisms exist by which an organization can be certified for conforming to ISO 9000 specifications. With this certification in hand, an organization can better sell its product or service to its customer. It can say that the product or service is the result of a process that continually tested for quality.
The government of the European Union has mandated that some products will not be imported into Europe unless the exporting organization can demonstrate compliance to ISO 9000. Organizations, such as the military, which have traditionally implemented costly reviews of quality in their suppliers can instead require that their suppliers demonstrate conformance to ISO 9000.
The International Organization of Standardization (ISO) does not itself test for conformance to ISO 9000. Conformance to ISO 9000 may, in general, be checked by
Rules exist for how such certification should be done, and organizations exist which certify other organizations as performing reliable ISO 9000 certifications. In the United Kingdom and Australia 3rd party audits of ISO 9000 compliance involves a system audit every three years and five mini-audits within each three year span. To receive certification a company must show that its documentation follows the quality standard and that its people follow the documentation (see Figure 2).
| Mapping Documents and Behavior | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| documents relative to standard | good | bad | |
| behavior relative to documents | good | documents conform to standard and people follow documents | documents do not follow standards but people follow documents |
| bad | documents conform to standard but people do not | documents do not follow the standard or are missing and people do not follow them | |
Figure 2: This 4x4 table has columns which indicate the quality of the documents and rows which indicate the behavior of people relative to the documents.
Sybase Incorporated has recently announced that its multimedia software products were the first of any independent software vendor in the United States to achieve ISO 9000 compliance. Within Hewlett Packard individual factories achieve ISO 9000 compliance. Within the United States about 6,000 institutions have been certified as ISO 9000 compliant. World-wide over 95,000 institutions have been certified as ISO 9000 compliant.
Globus Information Services Incorporated sells information about ISO 9000. For instance, it sells a CD-ROM entitled ISO 9000 Universe CD-ROM (North American Edition) which, among other things, lists the companies in North America that are ISO 9000 registered. O'Logic sells templates for Word for Windows or WordPerfect that a company can use to maintain records germane to achieving ISO 9000 certification. The American Society for Quality Control is the leading quality improvement organization in the United States, with more than 130,000 members. The Society helps members understand and use ISO 9000.
The emphasis on quality management and the importance of maintaining extensive information networks to achieve such management in organizations accounts for the importance of standards like ISO 9000. People can now work from home or anywhere else within a wide range of times so long as they can connect via the information highways to the work of their colleagues. Such flexibility is advantageous in rapidly changing environments.
Sam Walton ran an empire of Wal-Mart stores with a flat organizational structure that exploited information technology networks that collected extensive information about customer transactions at Wal-Mart stores. With a vision of reducing costs and making accessible to more customers more retail products, Walton created a quality management organization.
Many universities are under pressure to change in the same kind of way that the department stores of the mid-20th century were under pressure to change. They face a triple challenge: to improve quality of educational outcomes for students, to increase access to education for students, and to operate under conditions of financial austerity. To meet this challenge they need to exploit the information superhighway in quality-consistent ways.
The university needs to improve the quality of student outcomes under multiple constraints. Student enrollments are increasing due to the effect of the baby boom. Global fiscal austerity requires cost containment. The university wants to improve the quality of each student's credit hour, to increase the number of enrolled student credit hours, and to reduce the cost to the university and to the student of each credit hour. The university needs to empower people in quality-consistent ways and to exploit technology. Technology can help the university manage quality and provide wider access for students. This mission may be generalized to apply to many other organizations. Universities and many other organizations want to improve quality, increase their customer base, and reduce costs (see Figure 3). One approach to these goals is quality management. Such management depends on standards within the organization.
| Mission of Organization | |
|---|---|
| criterion | direction of change |
| quantity of customers |  |
| quality to customer |
|
| cost per customer |
 |
Figure 3: The column on the left gives attributes of performance. The column on the right shows the desired direction of change in those attribute values; an upward-pointing arrow means `increase' and a downward-pointing arrow means `decrease'.
A standard is a specification that is recognized within an organization. A product or process can be measured against a specification to establish whether it meets the standard. The organization could be a group of 10 people, a small company of 100 people, an industry of 1 million, a country of millions, or a world of billions. The most important standards for any organization are those which it develops to coordinate itself.
ISO 9000 provides a meta-standard. Each organization that wants to be recognized for the quality of its processes and products creates and maintains that standard internally. The way in which the international meta-standard was developed is similar in principle to the way that instances of it are developed within an organization.
Universities typically work to the quality of standards created by groups of professors and certified by groups of professors. Universities have not been striving to be explicitly ISO 9000 compliant. However, their intent is at times comparable to that of organizations that demonstrate ISO 9000 compliance.
How does the university develop internal standards? The university may create a task force with extensive representation of influential people. This task force proposes standards. After the task force completes its work, the normal apparatus of the university is invoked to ratify or amend the recommendations of the task force. Subsequent implementation of the ratified recommendations requires the support of existing and perhaps new groups within the organization.
The development of the quality standard within the university parallels the development of ISO 9000 itself. A group of business and government people in England were concerned about quality management. They organized a group within the British Standards Institute (BSI) to develop a specification. Other groups within BSI then discussed and ultimately ratified the proposed specification. The BSI result already reflected the direction for a large country. The successful effort to persuade the world through ISO of the importance of this standard represented another level of the same kind of process that had already occurred through BSI. The implementation of the standard has been supported by numerous other organizations, such as the earlier described American Society for Quality Control.
The trend in higher education can be used to illustrate ramifications of ISO 9000. New private organizations are entering into the higher education marketplace. These private organizations feel that they can compete where state-funded universities have typically held control because these new private organizations exploit to the maximum the information superhighway and quality management. One barrier to the success of these new universities is the traditional certification processes that are biased in favor of the existing universities. A university degree is certified by associations of professors from like-universities. If a new, private company wants to offer a radically new kind of curriculum, then will it get certification from its traditional competitors? Might these new universities instead seek ISO 9000 certification?
In the health care industry standards have become increasingly important. The explosive growth of health care costs is being contained by setting standards for quality care that are monitored across extensive information networks. One part of this approach has been to define categories of illness and to fix reimbursements for managing patients in certain illness categories. The Committee for European Normalization has a very active health care information technology standardization groups within it. They are developing many standards for health care information including some which provide models for the quality management of the entire health care industry information infrastructure.
Environmental protection has been a major political theme of the current quarter-century. The Rio Conference on the Environment held in 1992 helped stimulate the development of new standards that extend ISO 9000 into a particular concern for the environment. These new developments are leading towards the ISO 14000 standards which are expected to be issued in 1996 and which will prescribe requirements for environmental quality management. The ISO 14000 standards will include specifications for the implementation of environmental quality management systems, environmental audits, and environmental performance evaluations. ISO 14000 principles will be in many ways similar to ISO 9000 principles but with a different application.
While ISO 9000 itself is being updated, new standards are also appearing that are closely related to ISO 9000. This column has argued that such standards are important and that we should lend support to the further development of such standards in important application areas.
Huyink, David and Craig Westover, ISO 9000, Irwin Professional Publishing, New York, 1994
Voehl, Frank, Peter Jackson, David Ashton ISO 9000: An Implementation Guide for Small to Mid-Sized Businesses, St. Lucie Press, Delray Beach, Florida, 1994.