Design of Total Quality Management as Information Infrastructure: An empirical approach

The aim of this thesis is to make contributions to the theory of total quality management (TQM) with special emphasise on the problem of designing ISO 9000 quality management systems (QMS). When reading the current body of knowledge on how to design such systems, most theories and practice show that unless there is a sustained management sponsorship, it is impossible to make the QMS work. Other reasons why quality management systems fail may have to do with the QMS measurements not tied to business goals, the measurements irrelevant or not understood by key players, the QMS perceived unfair and thus resisted, the QMS motivates wrong behaviour, the QMS is expensive or cumbersome, and/or there is no action based on the measurements. In other words, the primary reasons for the failure of measurement oriented total quality management (TQM) programmes are not due to technical issues, but rather due to organisational issues. Based on my own 15 years of experience from quality management in industry, I find the organisational challenges mentioned above more often to be the norm than to be the exception. Based on discussions and interviews with TQM practitioners, I get the impression that this is an experience that is very much shared within the practitioner community. Research findings from academia or experience voiced by independent quality management experts, stating that the QMS must be sponsored by top management and focus on improving core business processes, may be good advice in theory, but in practise it may not be easy to achieve. Based on personal experiences with trying to implement quality management systems the " right way " , through the use of TQM projects, I changed strategy, focusing on an approach that could perhaps be described as " situated action " seeing the QMS as a complex adaptive system (CAS) to be cultivated rather than a machine to be engineered. Kevin Dooley's writing on CAS was a major influence on my QMS design. However, having a design theory that consists of improvisation and bricolage (" do-it-yourself ") is hardly a theory to rival traditional engineering methods, as it doesn't really tell us anything more than trivialities like " try various options, learn from errors, network with the right people, and never give up ". A proper theory for designing QMS implementation methods should produce design rules that can be evaluated against the ii goal of whether they are helpful …