Total Quality Management

The Naval Air Systems Command coined the term Total Quality Management (TQM) in 1985 to describe its approach to quality improvement, patterned after the Japanese-style management approach to quality improvement. Since then, TQM has taken on many meanings across the world. TQM methodology is based on the teachings of such quality gurus as Philip B. Crosby, W. Edwards Deming, Armand V. Feigenbaum, Kaoru Ishikawa, and Joseph M. Juran. Simply put, it is a management approach to long-term success that is attained through a focus on customer satisfaction. This approach requires the creation of a quality culture in the organization to improve processes, products, and services. In the 1980s and '90s, many quality gurus published specific methods for achieving TQM, and the method was applied in government, industry, and even research universities. The Malcolm Baldrige Award in the United States and the ISO 9000 standards are legacies of the TQM movement, as is the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI's) Capability Maturity Model (CMM), in which organizational maturity level 5 represents the highest level of quality capability.^[4] In 2000, the SW-CMM was upgraded to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).

The implementation of TQM has many varieties, but the four essential characteristics of the TQM approach are as follows:

• Customer focus: The objective is to achieve total customer satisfactionto "delight the customer." Customer focus includes studying customer needs and wants, gathering customer requirements, and measuring customer satisfaction.

• Process improvement: The objective is to reduce process variation and to achieve continuous process improvement of both business and product development processes.

• Quality culture: The objective is to create an organization-wide quality culture, including leadership, management commitment, total staff participation, and employee empowerment.

• Measurement and analysis: The objective is to drive continuous improvement in all quality parameters by a goal-oriented measurement system.

Total Quality Management made an enormous contribution to the development of enterprise applications software in the 1990s. Its introduction as an information technology initiative followed its successful application in manufacturing and service industries. It came to IT just in time for the redevelopment of all existing enterprise software for Y2K. The efforts of one of the authors to introduce TQM in the internal administrative services sector of research universities encountered token resistance from faculty oversight committees. They objected to the term "total" on the curious dogmatic grounds that nothing is really "total" in practice. As CIO, he attempted to explain TQM to a faculty IT oversight committee at the University of Pennsylvania that this name was merely a phrase to identify a commonly practiced worldwide methodology. But this didn't help much. However, he persevered with a new information architecture, followed by (totally!) reengineering all administrative processes using TQM "delight-the-customer" measures. He also designed a (totally) new information system to meet the university's needs in the post-Y2K world (which began in 1996 in higher education, when the class of 2000 enrolled and their student loans were set up).^[5]