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Monday, July 09, 2007

Quality has followed my working life, first implicit, later more explicit when I came to work directly with Quality management and now with Quality infrastructures.

The year I decided to leave the Royal Library and the project on the LIBRIS Library Information System (http://www.libris.kb.se/english/indexeng.jsp), I received, as a personal gift from one of my colleagues, a book with the title Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. The book became on my desk some time, before I opened it, and started to read it. I was not motivated for reading about neither Zen nor Motorcycles. Then I found a note inserted between two pages, from my colleague:
"We miss you in the project, ... I am not the only one in the library world, who feels sad about your departure from the project. I have tried to figure out what it is that is so sad. When I read about this book [Zen...] I found what it was: With you, Quality disappeared from the project!"
First I really felt ashamed, not having understood what the message was. After a while, and especially after reading the whole book, I became glad and proud. I hope I let my colleague Ingeborg know about my pride and satisfaction!

Having entered standardization already during the library project, Quality did not appear explicitly until the ISO 9000-drafts were presented in 1986. The SIS-support for organizations that wanted to implement the standards changed my working life, from Public Communication in general into Quality Management. During the early 90's it sometimes became a little bit too much. That may explain the advice I gave my son Tom, when he, in his work was asked to join a Quality development project. He wanted to prepare himself by reading some of the quality literature. He certainly knew the extensive space my books on Quality occupied in my bookshelf. From The Quality handbook, by Juran, to standard documents from the ISO 9000-series. I hesitated to recommend any book in which the word Quality were endlessly repeated, and were choosing two examples, which both dealt with the concept Quality, without using the term, i.e. books that were dealing with Quality, without mentioning it. The books were The Goal, by Eli Goldratt, and The World Champions [in Swedish], by Jan Helling. Both complied with my criterion; dealing with Quality without using the Quality terminology.

When moving from Quality management to International Development Co-operation around the year 2000, I found the concept Quality used in a new context: Quality infrastructure. In the beginning I had a lot of reservations to this use of the Quality-concept in such a context. Quality was usually defined as a characteristic of a delivered produce. Coming to "national infrastructures", I found it difficult to apply the existing Quality terminology. When I came to attend the planning activities within CEN of the EU-ASEAN Economic co-operation programme on Standards, Conformity Assessment and Quality, I felt a need for clarifying the Quality infrastructure-concept in a market perspective using the Process approach, that is mapping activities performed by using the verb form, instead of the usual Organizational approach, by using nouns for disciplines or institutions involved. That conceptual model is described in a recent article, published in ISO Focus, June 2007. To read the article, please visit my web site http://www.ambiprospect.com/ambi/en.

On my blog on Quality infrastructure, http://qualityinfrastructure.blogspot.com I will try to report on interesting developments in the area, an area which to my knowledge, is missing such a reviewing service. With a blog reader (web based RSS-reader) like Bloglines or Google Reader, you can easily get a notice of all new posts to this blog by subscribing to it by RSS- or Atom-feeds.