Discussion on:

What CIOs need to know about ISO 9000 standards

Standards can be a very good thing. If, they are enforced equally across the board. They can save enormous amounts of time and money when creating new projects or adjusting old ones. Standards can be very costly, if everyone is not using them or worse yet using various versions of the standards.

Standards, if enforced and reasonable, can help you control complex projects that would otherwise fail.

Unfortunately, some organizations only have informal standards that aren't comprehensive or enforced. These organizations look at results first and documentation later if at all. The resulting simplification makes things more complex in the long run.

I agree, standards can be a very good thing if used and applied intelligently to projects. My concern lies in the conflict between creating standards and guidelines vs the fact that most people who have significant experience in a field don't necessarily adhere to structure. One cannot "deconstruct" experience into a system; much of what leads people to make the decisions they do can have more to do with intuitive thought processes than with structured ones. Yet by the same token, a complete lack of structure when planning can result in chaos and unexpected (and expensive) consequences.

Perhaps one method would be to apply generalized standards at the outset, and distilling them into more specific categories as the project matures. Thiswould allowing enough creative freedom for those capable of using it intelligently, while generating documentation that can be followed by the less experienced, and also used as a reference to procedures when dealing with auditors and the like.

AS a qualified assesor/verifier for City & Guilds I cannot fail to agree with the necessity for standards.

Any standard, however, that can be bought is automatically devalued in my eyes. Fair enough certain criteria has to be met but any industry standard presumably is designed to protect the public from unscrupulous suppliers, of which there are many within the IT industry. If this is a genuine desire to protect the public why is it not imposed and why is it not free?

Lesley Gilbert L.C.G.I.,F.M.G.A.V.

Good document management is the keystone of a successful compliance effort. Our company, Quality Systems International, offers software that helps companies implement their quality standard in a consistent and straightforward way. We are one of the few providers of such technology that is, itself, certified ISO 9000. Have a look at http://www.qualitysys.com for more info.

Standards are a very BAD thing if enforced equally across the board. To do a good job usually requires the ability to go beyond the standard. And that will be the problem with these standards: they'll work fine for awhile until they become entrenched. Then they'll become a straighjacket. Eventually, IT departments will be about as efficient and friendly as any governmental bureaucracy. Little beetle-like auditors will begin to appear at your door -- just like the government today. Take a que from the fact that ISO 9000 is popular in Europe: a Europe that is trying to add a new transs-European bureaucracy (in Brussels) to it's already Kafakaesque national bureaucracies. Am I surprised they go for it? Nah, business as usual over there. But here, we should resist it.

I work for a company that not only got ISO9000 certification but also BABT certification which is the other European quality system you face if you want the CE certification so you can sell hardware in Europe. There is two things to remember about ISO9000. The first is if you don't want straight-jacket procedures then don't write them that way to start with. Second if you find that a procedure has become a straight-jacket then rewrite the procedure. You will find that most of your procedures will get rewritten over the years. Hopefully this is the case because we should find better ways to do things over time.

The reason your vendors want you to get ISO9000 is the same reason you will want your suppliers to become certified too. It makes the vendor approvial procedure a lot easier. The big thing is ISO9000 does not make quality but consistency which then be improved if you don't like the result. You will need some manpower to manage all of the quality documents and procedures and changes to them. You will have forms that you have to fill out and sign but that is not a big deal. You will also have to have internal auditors to keep an eye on things between visits of the registrar. Look at it this way. One day all companies willbe ISO9000 certified so you are just getting a head start on them.

Everyone's doing it so you should do it, right? Or a lot of people think it's good, so you should do it to be more impressive.

This thread is going pretty much as I thought it would.

There are a lot of people agin' it.

There are a few people fer' it.

Some people are trying to be moderate.

But nobody is presenting any evidence for whether it really achieves an improvement in real companies on the real planet. A lot of "could" and "would" and "can," but very little "does."

Except for the people who have pointed out that it costs money and slows things down. That's not necessarily bad. So do computers in general. They cost money and, at least at first, slow things down. So does Valium, but at least there is some evidence that Valium does something useful.

Maybe ISO 9000 is a good thing. Maybe it's a bad thing. Maybe it's a neutral thing. But it would be nice to see something more than opinions, arguments, and rationalizations. I.e., some evidence.

Arguing is fun, but don't you think that there should be something to show for it?

If there are that many companies having to do ISO 9000 work, is there a vague chance that some of the work has been duplicated more than once, with minor title/sequence changes?

If such a chance exists, then TechRepublic might be able to help outa lot of people by serving as a library for boilerplate ISO 9000 templates. Heck, it could even consider having 'open source' boilerplate that is always growing.

When the 'open source' ISO 9000 library is big enough, an enterprising group could create an interface that would allow people to select the items they want, make 'term substitutions' and automatically generate the standards.

Of course, all of that might require some cooperation and a decent knowledge of both sentence structure and programming. But I think it would be fun to do. Practical too, especially for small companies who can easily change their procedures to match 'canned' ISO 9000 standards.

Of course, to make it a real comparison, we have to have NON-ISO 9000 templates (or non-templates) as well.

The only trick is getting people to volunteer information. So, how about it, gals and guys?

Standard boilerplates for standard companies employing standard people. I once worked for a company that dealt with hundreds of letters every day all of which had to be individually dictated, and the typed up. When they investigated the "standard paragraphs" and "standard format" letter system they found it unworkable because of a fatal flaw. The company employed individuals and dealt with individuals not "standard units".

What was the fatal flaw?

Was it something inherent in the English language? Was it a procedural problem?

I'd have to know what the problem was before rejecting the boilerplate solution based on your experience.

Besides, boilerplate doesn'talways have to use the same solutions for the same problems. You could break down a process into ten or twenty steps, each with fifty or sixty variations, and generate millions of sets of standards. A relatively simple program would allow you to pick and choose the parts you need that are unique to your company. The results would be a rough draft of your future ISO-9000 standards.

Then a technical writer could go through and make sure that all the parts have the proper syntax and use company specific phrasing.

Think Lego brand building blocks. They have lots of different standards yet they can be used to build lots of individual things.

Don't think of ISO9000 as a standard way to do things that you must follow to do your job. "Your ISO standards" are "yours" because they document what "you do and how you do it" What it is trying to do is say if you do it "this way" today then do itthat way tomorrow and ... This is why there is not a "boilerplate standard" ISO9000 is trying to get you to do a procedure the same way every time. When you release a system to production most places of any size require you to fill out some form or forms to document that you did this. In the ISO9000 world there would be a copy of that form in the standard and an instruction on how to fill it out and that is all. When you hire a new employee you can say read these procedures and you will know how we release software to production and also what types of reviews and testing are required before that point. You should always start writing your "standard" from where you are "today" and then modify it in the future to imporve your processes. It does not try to turn software development into a rigid production line process.

I work for a company that not only got ISO9000 certification but also BABT certification which is the other European quality system you face if you want the CE certification so you can sell hardware in Europe. There is two things to remember about ISO9000. The first is if you don't want straight-jacket procedures then don't write them that way to start with. Second if you find that a procedure has become a straight-jacket then rewrite the procedure. You will find that most of your procedures will get rewritten over the years. Hopefully this is the case because we should find better ways to do things over time.

The reason your vendors want you to get ISO9000 is the same reason you will want your suppliers to become certified too. It makes the vendor approvial procedure a lot easier. The big thing is ISO9000 does not make quality but consistency which then be improved if you don't like the result. You will need some manpower to manage all of the quality documents and procedures and changes to them. You will have forms that you have to fill out and sign but that is not a big deal. You will also have to have internal auditors to keep an eye on things between visits of the registrar. Look at it this way. One day all companies willbe ISO9000 certified so you are just getting a head start on them.

I work for a company that not only got ISO9000 certification but also BABT certification which is the other European quality system you face if you want the CE certification so you can sell hardware in Europe. There is two things to remember about ISO9000. The first is if you don't want straight-jacket procedures then don't write them that way to start with. Second if you find that a procedure has become a straight-jacket then rewrite the procedure. You will find that most of your procedures will get rewritten over the years. Hopefully this is the case because we should find better ways to do things over time.

The reason your vendors want you to get ISO9000 is the same reason you will want your suppliers to become certified too. It makes the vendor approvial procedure a lot easier. The big thing is ISO9000 does not make quality but consistency which then be improved if you don't like the result. You will need some manpower to manage all of the quality documents and procedures and changes to them. You will have forms that you have to fill out and sign but that is not a big deal. You will also have to have internal auditors to keep an eye on things between visits of the registrar. Look at it this way. One day all companies willbe ISO9000 certified so you are just getting a head start on them.

There is a cultural division between Europe and the US in terms of ISO 9000 implementation and total quality management (TQM). It may be thought that they go hand in hand but this has not been the case. Some papers point out that "Individualism is stiffled" due to the team-centred operations of TQM. This may be why ISO 9000 is being now widely implemented in the US as it has strict guidelines and procedures which can be measured/audited. It is still the view in Europe that without a change in culture, towards a team oriented stance invoked by senior management, ISO 9000 will be a hollow gesture.
Some multi-nationals are now suffering the consequences of non-compliance as the different interpretations of standards are causing confusion of procedures. Take a look at the company's quality manual for the last time it was updated and find out who is the responsible officer for managing quality. I would be suprised if there would still be anyone controling or keeping records updated. There has been lip-service paid to quality by some senior management and they have all been sent out on the weekend courses. It is the people on the shop floor who need to be taught about quality and it is usually these people who are kept in the dark and therefore the ISO 9000 compliance will ultimately fail or be meaningless for those businesses.

The people at all levels of the comapny have to be trained in the beginning and then retrained once a year there after. If a procdure has changed then the people that operate under that procedure have to be retrained on the new procedure. We starteddown this path 8 1/2 years ago and it was a big job but a huge amount of good has come out of it. One big thing is when you hire someone they take the training and they know how we operate right away in place of the long procedure of OJT. ISO9000 only added two people to our 160 person engineering and manufacturing operation and they provide help in a lot of situations. What I am trying to say is it is natural to expect the worse out of someting like this but it is not a huge burdon on anyone except documantation control/ change managment and they have a real job on their hands because they are the gate keepers of the system.

My experiences as a marketing consultant has afforded me the opportunity to witness numerous companies attempts to implement quality standards.

Pros: These programs help implement efficient operation and production procedures for struggling companies.

Cons: These procedures and even the consideration of implementing these procedures send shivers down the backs of mid management. The results can be devastating to corporate morale.

Fact: Most mid sized companies that rush into a serious quality control program with gusto, who spends thousands if not millions on implementation later limp away to lick their wounds.

fact: Most mid sized companies abandond these programs or compromise to a facade of a program.

Conclusion:

For those with the fortitude and right employee base, good luck on your efforts to implement. The rewards are there if you can do it right.

Good luck

After reading thru this string, I see a lot of misinformation about ISO 9000. It's a quality measurement standard, that's all. It's not Lucifer. I would think that D_Dubya who claims to be a scientist would embrace it. If you do an experiment it has to be documented in such a manner that the results can be repeated....reliably. I realize a lot of new developments are mistakes at first, but they have to be reliably reconstructed before any mass production can take place.
ISO compliance does not have to be a nightmare if it is done properly. We have an electronic forms repository and locally available hardcopies. It is how YOUR COMPANY documents it's quality system.
ISO 9000 boils down to being real simple:
document what you do (and leave it high level enough for some creativity) and then do what you document.
It's a pain sometimes but when I started in this business we had to log every job that ran on the mainframe, start, stop times, good, abend etc..... I hated it! GuaranteedISO 9000 isn't near that bad!

Or at least I used to be until a couple of years ago.

Personally, I have no feelings pro or con with respect to ISO 9000.

But, if ISO 9000 is just as you say, I join him in the challenge. If the documentation process ISO 9000 uses is so great, show us the documentation that measures how well it works.

If it's so great, there must be OODLES of it lying around in lots of organizations.

In this thread, nobody who supports ISO 9000 has yet come up with a single web address or referenceto a report. I can come up with a hypothesis to explain this: maybe it isn't so great.

Do you, or anybody else in favor of ISO 9000 have anything which can falsify that hypothesis? If so, let's see it. If not, don't tell scientists what they should embrace.

I assume because you are not paid for it?
You seem like a true scientist to me, and I always enjoy your insights. I know this is way off topic, but somehow, the "I used to be" a scientist part just stuck in my craw. In my view, when you use the scientific method you are a scientist, but then I believe a log can also be a chair.
I am curious where you stand on this though.

Well, yes, because I stopped being paid for it. Which really isn't true, because I'm paid for using the scientific method most days, but it isn't in my job title, and most of the people I work with think that science is a bunch of facts.

However, I'm out of the loop of publish-or-perish, demo-or-die, wear-comfortable-clothes, engage-in-professional-pissing-contests, and live-a-life-of-genteel-poverty.

I agree with you about the philosophy, but I wanted to forestall the possibility of ticking off anybody who still had a faculty job. Also, there are certain things about the culture and anthropology of science that have receded from relevance to my life. One is the fact that scientists really like it when you point out flaws and errors, and business folks seem to hate it.

A lot of the messages in this thread speak from personal experience with ISO 9000 and the experiences are bad. I've had my own. This kind of approach is stifling. Don't be fooled by the fact that it appears to work in your company, in its relatively early stages. (There's a message in this thread by a government employee who says his agency adopted ISO 9000, but now wants to dump it after encoutering high dollar and manpower costs.)

Doing a good job, which involves a lot of intangibles like creativity, a sense of accomplishment, being in control, is not about "experiments." That modern corporations are so hung up on such things is part of the reason why I, and I'm sure many others, got out of the corporate world. By the way, your own language is equivocal in this regard when you say "leave it high enough for some creativity." Think about that word "some." Why would any entity only want some creativity? Wouldn't they want as much as they can get?

You also use the magic qualifier "if done proplerly." Well, if you don't do it "properly," then I suppose you can spend huge resources hiring consultants to get it right? Capital may be freely available for your corporation, but for most it's darned hard to get and we want to spend it on our products, not on regs. Moreover, why is ISO 9000 so essential at this point in history? If you look at the economic history of the United States, you'll find that some of its biggest growth periods were during free-wheeling times with little regulation and little measuring and experiments. The most exciting and fecund time in computer history has been during the early days when things were wide open. Working in IT was pretty heady and you felt like you really contributed. Now, it's boring stuff with lots of routine paper work (e.g. helpdesk and maintenance tickets). Adding ISO 9000 to this burden is not going to make it more exciting.

A lot of the messages in this thread speak from personal experience with ISO 9000 and the experiences are bad. I've had my own. This kind of approach is stifling. Don't be fooled by the fact that it appears to work in your company, in its relativelyearly stages. (There's a message in this thread by a government employee who says his agency adopted ISO 9000, but now wants to dump it after encoutering high dollar and manpower costs.)

Doing a good job, which involves a lot of intangibles likecreativity, a sense of accomplishment, being in control, is not about "experiments." That modern corporations are so hung up on such things is part of the reason why I, and I'm sure many others, got out of the corporate world. By the way, your own language is equivocal in this regard when you say "leave it high enough for some creativity." Think about that word "some." Why would any entity only want some creativity? Wouldn't they want as much as they can get?

You also use the magic qualifier "if done proplerly." Well, if you don't do it "properly," then I suppose you can spend huge resources hiring consultants to get it right? Capital may be freely available for your corporation, but for most it's darned hard to get and we want to spend it on our products, not on regs. Moreover, why is ISO 9000 so essential at this point in history? If you look at the economic history of the United States, you'll find that some of its biggest growth periods were during free-wheeling times with little regulation and little measuring and experiments. The most exciting and fecund time in computer history has been during the early days when things were wide open. Working in IT was pretty heady and you felt like you really contributed. Now, it's boring stuff with lots of routine paper work (e.g. helpdesk and maintenance tickets). Adding ISO 9000 to this burden is not going to make it more exciting.

Creative experimentation, whether it's in assembly lines or in software, is not precluded by any standard *in a development context*.
However, an intelligent manager does not place anything *into production* without careful consideration of its overall effects, which involves planning and documentation.
To do otherwise is little more than anarchy, which will quickly become unmanageable, unmaintainable, and eventually inconsistent and unprofitable.
The key is to know when/where "creative experimentation" applies vs when/where carefully considered/documented implementation should take place.

than chose anarchy. Get the FAQ here:

http://flag.blackened.net/intanark/faq/index.html

Anarchy, does not necessarily lead to "unmanageable, unmaintainable, and eventually inconsistent and unprofitable" situations. In fact, historically, it has been quite lucrative for some. As for "unmanageable, unmaintainable, and inconsistant", I guess you prefer eating the same thing over and over again too? Even in business, not changing will destroy you.
The trick in business, in my book, is to push the limits and stay in the barely manageable. A guy at Hallmark once called it: "Orbiting the Giant Hairball". At any rate, Anarchy isn't this thing which you describe.

Somehow ISO9000 has been transmorgified into the only alternative to anarchy? Whew!, we live in heady times!

Standards are like vitamins: sure you need some, but too much can cause harm or, if not, be a waste of money. Nobody who is skeptical of ISO is saying that no standards should exist, rather that there is no clear need to implement one as comprehensive as ISO.

Prosperity, the ability to make money in the market place, are due to individual creativity, effort, etc. This is so evenin a corporate environment, though an understanding of this may be lost in today's corporate culture. The prosperity of any company depends more on the quality of people than on laying down regs or codifying procedure. That this approach has failed repeatedly when applied to running governments seems lost to most of ISO's advocates. But I understand that it's due to looking at issues narrowly instead of broadly. As someone who once worked in government and saw this coming down the pike I won't say it will never work. Rather, what you'll see is some initial success here and there -- like those who make the first dollar in a Ponzi scheme -- then as it becomes universal, collapse occurs because of ossification.

?Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of times as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.?

-Kierkegaard from The Concept of Irony

Yep. We are still the clowns and the town is still burning. Gotta figure this "possible anarchy" mess out before we can see the fire....

You are right though. The standards themselves aren't magic, but they are used, usually mostly at their inception, by people who make them seem so.

Honk Honk, check out my clown shoes ;>

When browsing over the article I got the feeling that the discussion is about the ISO 9000 as it was before ISO 9001:2000 came along.
Many of the discussed items do not conform with ISO 9001:2000.
Please remember that the use of standardization isnot to produce tons of unread paper rather than documenting the business processes in a way to avoid somebody new joining the company to srap averything and rebuild it as he or she can't figure out how it really works.

The key to making standardization work is knowing what (and who) to standardize. Standards and procedures apply best to manual, hourly-wage workers. With professionals, who are paid to use professional discretion, you have to (1) be selective about what needs to be and can be standardized and (2) make sure you have buy-in. That's why one school of QA works from the ground up, facilitating the professionals' development of standards. This is the "classical psychoanalysis" of QA, and management isn't patient enough to wait till doomsday. It's easier and faster to tailor boilerplate standards in consultation with the professionals, so you aren't trying to control the wrong things. The key is to help the professionals understand that standardscan take care of the trivial decisions, leaving them free to make the important ones.

All ISO and QA programs are a crock. In the company where I work, the standards are only followed when there is an on site audit. Other than that, people do what they have to do to get the job done.

ISO-9000 is nothing more than well-organized method of gaining and keeping business processes under control. If a business has already achieved that end, ISO-9000 becomes only a validation that the process control exists. The bottom-line is that most (not all) businesses "DO NOT" have it under control and other businesses do not want to get burned by non-compliant companies inefficiencies. Yes, there are other methods of gaining that control. All are painful and take time and effort! But they are worth it! ISO-9000 is just the most touted method used now. It might not the best match for your particular company. But it is 1000% better than a company without process control. Most of the time a company that has it's sh_ _ together can get it?s certification and learn a great deal about itself, it's venders and their customers. Then they can improve where they need to (Not where they don't!) and pass those improvements on to their customers.

ISO 9001 has nothing to do with "Standards" which defined as a noun establishes a benchmark for comparison. Quality is measured by comparison to ?standards? and again, ISO 9000 has nothing to do with quality.

The simple explanation of ISO 9001 is?Say what you do?, and ?Do what you say?! ISO 9001 has everything to do with the process of accomplishment, whether manufacturing or adding a user to the network. The verbs ?Standardizing? and ?Standarization? have more to do with uniformity and THAT is core of ISO 9001.

For twenty years before I ever heard of ISO 9001, I worked and dealt with organizations that had Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). For those that think that this is a ?Communist? or ?Marxist? incursion in to capitalist industry, think again. This is simply another name for a common-sense practice that excellent managers have been using for years.

Standards need more thought than some companies give them. For example, my employer created a standard for usernames. The standard specified that the employee's first and last initals would be followed by his employee number and a letter, usually "A". This is a great system for creating a unique identifier for a computer to use. It's an extremely poor choice for identifiers to be used by people!

Our applications print the username of the person who took an order on the work order. The business uses those usernames for tracking quality control issues. When the first order came out of the printer with RG10090A instead of "GILBERTR" people screamed. It's not too tough to find Gilbert, R. in the phonebook but there's no way to find out who RG10090A is!!

We went back to the user's last name and first initial or initials to construct our usernames. The corporate standard was unworkable!

If the person who created that standard had done some analysis first he might have created a workable standard.

One problem with standards is that you have to apply them to nonstandard situations. In several of my positions I have had to deal with complaints, and problems. Many of these where the same and according to standards such as ISO9000 should be handled in the same way. Unfortunately, for the implementation of a "standard", I was dealing with people, who are not "standard".

Another problem that can arise is where you are operating to a higher "standard" than is required and in order to achievecertification you have to lower your operating standards. This has happened to me on at least two occasions.

Standardizing inefficiency does not make it efficient! I work for an non-profit hospital and we have to conform to JCAHO standards, which are a lot like ISO9000. What I have found is that people (who by their nature don't like change) cling to outdated and inefficient standards "because that's what the JCAHO manual says", rather than thinking of creative, more efficient ways of performing the same task. The only time anuthing gets reviewed and processes hurriedly changed is immediately prior toan on-site accreditation review. Is this any way to effectively run a business?

ISO is about being able to reliably repeat a process day in and day out. Even if it is being done in an inefficient way, it is consitantly repeatable.

As the article states though, by documenting you can attempt to see where your problems are and update your processes and proceedures to fix them. Just because you document it one way does not mean it cannot change.

ISO can be a good thing if handled properly. The problem is, in most places it is not handled or implemented properly.

It's not about job quality per se: the devil is in that per se. I can well imagine a time when IT people react much like Charlie Chaplin in the movie Modern Times, reliably repeating a process day in and day out. Documenting is not what it's cracked up to be and standards won't make it any better. You need good people with brains and imagination (imagine that!). They can beat the pants off any bureaucratic standard, any day, any time. Bring 'em on! But, maybe we're reaching an era when such qualities are a threat? Perhaps as the government gets more entrenched in business, business looks more like government. Hence ISO 9000, which are just a set of government style SOPs.

more red tape, european style constipation, more eurpoean sytle bureaucracy...as if there isn't enough of this stuff floating around already costing millions by trying to adhere to usless paperwork regulations...

ISO9000 (1,2) was big here in Australia when it was first promoted. Small to Mid sized companies soon discovered that the time wasted implementing and maintaining the 'Standard' was far to excessive. A lot of businesses now stated 'Conforming to ISO900? standards' this appears to acceptable to most clients.

ISO 9000 is a European framework for companies to outline their standards and strategies but it is based on the Japanese culture of team involvement. This was first though up in the USA in the 1950's and implemented in Japan by Deming (he of the Deming prize) amongst other American academics and industrialists. So it is a bit of a pointless gesture blaming Europe for more red tape legislation based on the American quality measuring system of the 1950's.

ISO 9000 may have been based on American ideas but if you read the article, it's getting its biggest push from Europe and for good reason: Europeans, through their passion for central planning, love bureaucracy. The fact that it may have been thought of here doesn't matter. For that matter, the fact that Deming and Japan went ga-ga over such approaches doesn't impress me at all. I once worked for Tokai Bank and you can keep "the Japanese culture of team involvement."

There is a very old saying, something like: "Those who fail to know history... are bound to repeat its mistakes..."

I've seen various flavors of TQM with various name changes and in each case the effort has fallen apart in small and mid-size companies. In each case the "culture change" just couldn't be adopted at either the top or bottom of the organization structure.

Now the company I've recently joined is heading down the ISO road. Creativity, responsiveness, efficiency,empowerment...? Buzz words just don't cut it when you face real competition. It was an inability to sense and respond to customer desires that put the last company I worked for out of business. If you can't compete and you waste money besides, you're not going to be around very long, maybe that's why there aren't any responses to the $$ savings challenge elsewhere in this discussion.

Having recently changed careers to an IT field I see the lack of standards and lack of train in the computer field appalling. There needs to be more training and standards in the computer industry. That is the reason for the MCSE certificate program. Computer personal are infamous for lack of training others they just point to the problem and say figure it out. The cause is that most are over worked and because the technology is changing so rapidly. The problem is that many IT people keep valued information to them selves, this feeds their ego and makes them feel irreplaceable. However, this does not benefit the person or the company. They feel they can?t take time off or go on vacation, ?the company would not survive without them?? If youhave ever worked on a problem for hour then later come to a co-worker and explain the situation and they reply ?O that is because ?..was done here. Here is what you need to do.? You know what I am talking about, obviously not every thing can be standardized but there needs to be SOP Standard Operating Procedures in place.

I ask the same question about ISO 9000 that I ask about UML or anything else.

Is there any evidence that it works?

I see a lot of faith and nice arguments, but I don't see a lot of evidence that the stuff coming out of ISO 9000 organizations is better or even more reliable than the stuff that came out of organizations before ISO 9000.

Wonder if any study has done, my experience tells me that it can be a rubber-stamp...

I believe no one will deny that ISO9000 can do good. Hard to find is the balance between too procedural to stifle the creativity or too loose that may sacrificeefficiency or lose clue on what has gone wrong.