Qua Vadis quality management standardization?

International committee ISO/TC 176 is responsible organization for the general standardization in the field of quality management. That committee has defined in 2001 a long term strategic plan for the quality management standardization in document “Horizon 2010”. That consists of vision, goals, and strategic intents and strategies.

The whole international standards family of quality management consists of many different kinds of documents prepared by the ISO/TC 176 committee and some other sector specific standardization committees. Now the fourth generation of the ISO 9000 standards is under preparation consisting of amendment of ISO 9001 and revision of ISO 9004

• Amending ISO 9001, “Quality management systems – Requirements” includes only very few minor changes in the text.
• Revising ISO 9004, “Managing for sustainable success – A quality management approach” is a complete rewriting the whole standard in the form of general guidance.

The new ISO 9001 will be published in 2008 and ISO 9004 in 2009. Now draft documents are available.

Although the situation seems to be reasonably good in general and the basic ISO 9000 standardization (ISO 9001 and ISO 9004 standards) have had an enormous impact on the development of quality practices globally, this has not taken place without problems and drawbacks:

• There is stagnation in the development of the ISO 9001 standard. Factually there has been no essential development during the recent 20 years in the standard and no remarkable change is expected during the next 10 years. However, organizational business environments and communities are changing at increasing pace.
• Standard ISO 9004 is too general, vague, and customary and therefore hardly can provide practical guidance or support for organizations’ performance development. There are better other literature and reference material available for this purpose. Assessment model in the new draft standard is theoretical and does not reflect the needs of organizations. It cannot compete with the recognized performance excellence models (quality awards criteria).
• ISO 9000 standardization process is too slow and poorly managed and cannot follow the general development and trends of business environments and society at large.
• Standardization bodies have weak means to control or support the use of the standards. The use of the standards is directed strongly by commercial consulting / certification business but not by genuine business needs.

When we started the ongoing work with the next generation of the ISO 9000 standards we had a strong enthusiasm – at least with the ISO 9004 standard – to develop something different from earlier but later it proved that that was not possible with the existing standardization practices.

In spite of this harmful development in the standardization, however, organizations have all possibilities to get maximum benefits in their realizing ISO 9000 standards with their own proactive activities by:

1. Understanding the ultimate purposes of the ISO 9000 standards.
2. Avoiding the known problems of ISO 9000 applications, and quality realizations in general.
3. Liberating themselves from the enslaving formalism of the standards documents and consultants / certifiers.
4. Taking into account the genuine needs, expectations and environments of the business in question.
5. Applying also all other beneficial references with the ISO 9000 standards. A good way to start to use the ISO 9000 standards is to carry out self-assessment based on some recognized performance excellence model.
6. Challenging to the future by recognizing the weak signals in the standardization in a multi-faceted way.