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Juhani
Anttila
QUA VADIS QUALITY PROFESSION? Abstract This paper considers actual problems and challenges within the whole quality profession and in today's quality management and quality assurance realizations in organizations. Problems are exemplified with the recent development of the quality related international standardization and usage of the standards. Also changed business environments give birth to new problems but also to new opportunities. The paper brings forward how to respond to these situations especially regarding to quality management in knowledge-intensive organizations (in fact all organizations are today very strongly knowledge-intensive). The paper presents possibilities for practical and beneficial applications of new principles, tools and organization-infrastructures for development of business-integrated quality management especially based on information and knowledge work environments in organizations applying disruptive IT (understood as Interactive Technology) innovations. Topics presented are new breakthrough ideas compared to typical
current organizational applications and researches in the field of quality management and assurance.
Ideas presented may be implemented into all kinds of organizations.
Very new issue is to give guidance how to apply the newest Web 2.0
(O'Reilly, 2005) solutions for
quality management. Consideration of problems and challenges of
new business environments may help organizations avoid or repeat
pitfalls in their quality development. The paper may also be seen
as a source of ideas for interesting and significant future research
topics. There are serious problems in the prevalent quality management approaches It is easy to observe that there are plenty of cases where established
organizational quality management approaches of yesterday or today don't respond to the
real needs of the organizations: In many cases quality development has not redeemed its promises indisputably. ISO 9000 standardization as an example of problematic development in quality management ISO 9000 standards have already a long history and strong impact - in both good and bad - on the development of quality cultures globally (Anttila, 1999). The international standards family of quality management consists of many different kinds of documents prepared by the international ISO/TC 176 committee and some other sector specific standardization committees. Now the fifth generation of ISO 9000 basic standards is under consideration, and the last published versions of the standards are ISO 9001 published in 2008 and ISO 9004 published in 2009 (ISO, 2008; ISO, 2009). Although situation seems to be reasonably good in general in ISO
9000 standardization and the basic ISO 9000 standards have had an
enormous impact on the development of quality practices globally,
this has not taken place without problems and drawbacks: Problems in developing and using recognized standards of quality management promote quality to lose its genuine attraction and interestingness. This also creates disappointments towards quality professionalism. Commercialized certification business based on stagnant ISO 9001 has endangered diversity and innovation in quality management in organizations. There is threat to future of the whole management and ISO 9000 standardization. Although ISO 9000 standards are most well-known and used reference for organizations' quality development, many of the users are not aware of the related problems and their reasons. Changed business environments set new requirements for quality management Business environments of all kinds of organizations have changed
from certainty and predictability to uncertainty and ambiguity.
That includes the following: These changed business environments have remarkable effects on management solutions in all organizations and therefore they must also be taken into account in modern quality management. Responding to challenges and necessity of changes in quality management There are many organizational cases of coping and feeling satisfactory with certain theories, principles, techniques and methodology of quality that are being tried or used distinctly. Examples include usages of ISO 9000, quality awards criteria or SixSigma. In many cases major achieved benefits are not necessarily caused by those particular methodologies but mainly by decisive and active management by using any systematic methodology. A well-known example is General Electric Company, SixSigma and Jack Welch (Welch, 2005). However, there is an expanding critical discussion about the prevalent approaches of quality discipline and presenting needs for change. Particularly central issue that has emphasized by all recognized references is how to integrate quality measures with business management and to take into account relevant business environments (ISO, 2008a; NIST, 2007). There are new initiatives presenting business integrated approach
of quality management that may be recognized as weak signals to
changes even in ISO 9000 standardization:
Figure 1 shows findings from the survey's area 2 of table 1. This
includes results from 512 persons, different kinds of organizations
and about 30 countries. According to survey results all the aspects of Table 1 were very relevant, important and even critical in the business of participated organizations. Organizations had already done some measures to take them into account in developing their management practices. However, general awareness and methodological support available for this was rather little. Management standards and other references supporting management development were used fairly much among the organizations. However, according to the respondents those materials don't support strongly application of time, speed & agility and related aspects in their managerial solutions. American Society for Quality (ASQ, 2008) has very recently carried
out its fifth Futures Study with a group of circa 100 international
experts in the field to provide understanding of the forces that
would shape the future of quality (Table 2). The next ASQ Futures Study is being done in 2011. One may draw conclusion from the ASQ study (Table 2) that those traditional and prevalent solutions of quality management that are based on narrow quality management approaches, quality realizations within restricted organizational scopes only and mass production should be replaced by global, human related and societal measures utilizing innovations and new technology and impacted by new markets' power and individual needs and expectations. New principles, tools, and infrastructures are necessary for quality
management in order to avoid existing problems and take into account
modern changed and fast developing business environments. However,
organizations should learn to live and cooperate in situations where
there are many different kinds of business relationships and realizations.
In these new environments we may according to Tekes' GIGA Programme
(Tekes, 2008) recognize indicators affecting business models of
organizations in four different dimensions: social indicators, technological
indicators, industry indicators (see table 3), and market indicators.
Business environments and changes come up between two extreme scenarios: It is typical that both scenarios will exist simultaneously and
intermingled within a business community, and organizations may
behaviour differently during their different development stages.
This common-mode development of organizations' businesses should be
seen and understood as basis for effective organization-dedicated
quality management development. Scenarios and affecting indicators
are foundations for organizations' business modelling that includes
the following also very strongly quality and quality management
related questions to be solved by each organization: All these studies and observations reveal the importance of information and knowledge and new challenges related technologies. Levaging usage of information and knowledge is a core area of quality management Organization's quality management system means quality of management that is carried out in a systematic way and covers the whole organization. Success in management is based on right business related knowledge and management skills to use knowledge on time effectively and efficiently for current business needs. Business leaders also need in their daily tasks a lot of very specialized knowledge and information. The essence of quality management is to manage organizational resources and operations by relevant information and knowledge. Needs of using information have been increased overwhelmingly within all kinds of organizations, their management systems, business processes, and relationships with stakeholders (Anttila, 2002). Very often in quality approaches, quality professionals have placed
stress on documentation (or particularly on quality documentation).
Often they have referred to the requirements of ISO 9000 standards.
However, real requirements for documentation come only from business
needs, not from standards which are only guiding references or general
models for business operations. Documentation practices for managing
an organization have developed from passive and separate documents
to dynamic and flexible systems for leveraging usage of information
and knowledge in collaborative group work. Old solutions (which
however are still major practices in many organizations) include:
An organization needs to share information and knowledge among its managers, employees, and people of stakeholders. In order to manage situation, organizations have invested in IT solutions. However, development and use of IT solutions has been problematic in practice. During past years many IT applications have made jobs of people more complex and difficult, rather than simplifying their work (Collins, 2001). Effective use of modern disruptive (Christensen, 1997) information
technology gives completely new possibilities especially strengthening
applications in area of tacit knowledge that, in fact, covers the
most important and largest part of business knowledge. These new
solutions include: Portal (Collins, 2001) is a modern solution for knowledge-content businesses and seen as a solution to chaotic information situation in organizations. Negative point is that portals are expensive and complicated to create and maintain and suitable mainly for big organizations. Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2005) means second-generation of Internet-based services, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies, that let people collaborate and share information online in ways previously unavailable. Web 2.0 based social networking applications are simple and cheap solutions of disruptive innovations that have wide variety of quality management related uses such as personal work support, collaborative cooperation and learning, carrying out and managing projects, supporting process work and cooperation in networked business environments. Their strengths include customizable group systems that allow many groups to work simultaneously on sharing individual knowledge and to create new mutual knowledge. Designed to ease problems solving with group based working, new solutions of knowledge work environments make it possible to work in groups, inside and outside the organization (Anttila, J., 2006). Web 2.0 tools became popular in their extensive use in Internet but now these applications are being launched also to organization-internal business purposes. They make also possible to create virtual network organizations for modern business communities (Ryyppö, 2007) Basic Web 2.0 tools, blogs, wikis and aggregators (Anttila, 2006),
promote well-known SECI process for knowledge transformation: Socialization
- Externalization - Combination - Internalization of knowledge (Nonaka,
Toyama, Konno, 2000). Additionally Web 2.0 provides a lot of applications
that are interesting from quality management's point of view. That
includes use of the following features of Web 2.0: Enterprises have already made serious preparations for their Web
2.0 strategies, as reported by recent news (JackBe Corporation,
2007): Solutions should be made individually in each organization or business community. Table
3 presents one example for an organization's modern networking strategy
(McDonnald, 2007). Based on Web 2.0 principles and tools we have developed company-dedicated
solutions to support companies' managerial quality activities. Solutions are
built as management Knowledge Work Environments (KWE) (Anttila,
2008a; Anttila, 2006) and used as online Web service by "Software-as-a-Service"
(SaaS Resource Center, 2008). Figure 2 shows how KWE tools are available
at the user interface of the system for collaborative activities
of management processes. Especially strategic management is strongly a knowledge-based collaborative and innovative activity where typically organization's board of directors, executing managers, selected experts, personnel representatives, and stakeholders' representatives may be involved. Its purpose is to strive for enhancing overall business performance of an organization for better competitiveness and success. Strategic management consists particularly of organizational change management. However, simultaneously also organization's current business results should be ensured as a whole as planned. The principle is that KWE's wiki covers organization's whole business. Wiki includes access to the following main business management elements: Corporate business foundations, business processes, managerial tools, business information, stakeholders and business results. Quality assurance is strongly related to information and communication Quality assurance refers to measures with which a supplier strives for getting its customer-organizations or other stakeholders convinced of the fact that requirements pertaining to products are met and that the supplier has reasonable abilities for that. There are many possible solutions for establishing quality assurance but the essence of a good quality assurance is always an effective communication between organization and each of stakeholders. Third party certifications have lost their credibility as an effective solution for quality assurance (Anttila, 2008d). There are continually business actions between organizations and their stakeholders that reciprocally influence each other. Added value to the parties is created by these transactions, but there are always also involved transaction costs (Coase, 1937). Increasing communication effectiveness is a great challenge to development of principles and practices for supplier relationship. Use of Internet's possibilities and particularly Web 2.0 social media is a great challenge because the cost of individual transactions may be decreased to minimum and consequently one may increase the amount of transactions effectively. Internet may also give quite new possibilities for supplier and quality assurance communication, e.g. multilateral communication, real-time multimedia information, "e-certificate" solutions, collaborative social networking applications, and "Enterprise One-To-One solutions" (Peppers & Rogers, 1999). Confidence is most critical factor for success in cooperating between partnering organizations. It is also a competitive advantage because it is difficult to imitate a genuine confidence and to create it in a short term. Transparency is the core element for building confidence among cooperating organizations and individuals. Increased risks and uncertainties within the operational environment set raised requirements for confidence. Key measures for development of situation focus on effective communication solutions. Comprehensive approach to new quality profession In practice the new way to organizational quality realizations
consists of three key aspects (Anttila, 2008c): As a summary when striving for competitiveness in today's business
circumstances one could underscore following theses of the new approach
for applying quality management: Effective implementation of innovative organization-dedicated business-integrated quality management does not call for any extra measures or investments. Experiences have proved that it is always worthwhile to improve the existing management approach and practices of the organization based on a systematic methodology and organizational learning (Senge, Roberts, Ross & Kleiner, 1995; Anttila, 2008a). However, implementing new ideas requires courage from organizations to step out and stand out from the growing crowd of look-likes. New approaches are still more important in new dynamic business environments than in traditional business relationships. For quality management the organization must be always ready but never finished. There are lots of new principles, tools and infrastructure solutions available already now for organizations' quality of management development especially related to new interactive technology for managing organizational business information and knowledge. However, also additional research is needed especially for recognizing implications of new business change indicators and business models to the aims and purposes of quality management. References 1. Agile Alliance, 2001. "Manifesto for agile software development". [This text is based on a paper presented in Oulu, Finland in 2008
(ICPQR 2008 Conference)] |
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