Stephen has now introduced John Gilbey who is talking about “Managing Standards – Delivering a Quality Assured Web Environment”.

To summarise – we (the Web management community) are now responsible for critical information and systems. John argues that we need to start taking Quality seriously – consider standards like ISO 9000. We (as a community) are happy to buy into technical standards, but what about management standards?

So – to start John is asking us to think of adjectives describing an institutional web service. Mine are:

Service
Interactive
User oriented

(to describe our portal)

Audience contributions were (marked with positive or negative connotations)

Slow (-)
Clunky (-)
Disparate (+/-)
Uneven (-)
Anarchic (+/-)
Big (+/-)
Labyrinthine (-)
Brilliant (+)
Dull (-)
Moribund (-)
Reliable (+)
Unfinished (-)
Outdated (-)

Some of these are clearly just trying to test John’s spelling.

What is noticeable that the majority of these have negative connotations. But John argues that the negative traits tend to be the ones that come out – not necessarily reflecting the real quality of the service.

So – what is quality?

ISO says: “The totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied need”

ISO define standards – e.g. A4 (ratio of 1 to the square root of 2) is defines by ISO 216.

As an example of quality as relates to web services John is just relating the experience of his son applying to university. After sending off a for a prospectus, it never arrived. The attitude that his son had was – why should I ‘spend’ my fees at a place that can’t be bothered to send a propectus. Eventually the prospectus arrived many months later – having come via Uruguay – it seems, the result of one of those ‘choose your country’ dropdown boxes you have to choose from.

Government funded research now has to meet quality standards (Joint Code of Practice for Research). This implies compliance with the code of practice, external auditing, adoption of formal standards (e.g. ISO 9000)

ISO 9000 is a family of internationally acknowledge standards, which make a model for managing an organisation. It is based on 8 principles, including:

Customer Focus
Leadership
Involvement of people
Process approach (activities and resources are managed as a process)
System approach to management (join up your processes)
Continual improvement (Plan, Do, Check, Act)
Factual approach to decision making (note that when the audience were challenged with this one, there was a clear lack of belief this happened in their institutions)

I’m not entirely convinced by this. I’m happy with the idea that quality is important, and some process can help this – but ISO 9000 is a big tool, and by some reports, expensive to