ABSTRACT
One way to help along the journey towards CI is to consider how to work with selected external quality standards and awards. The variety of choice of these in the global marketplace is huge and so informed decision-making is required, as part of a strategic focus on performance improvement within an organization. A critical part of this decision-making will be the perceived value of working with such standards, which may have an impact both internally inside the organization and externally in the marketplace. In this chapter, we consider the role of strategy to see how this is formulated and developed, and where it might help determine and influence the achievement of external standards and awards, as part of a focus on CI and BE. We then explore some of the issues to be considered including the resources required to gain the award, the types of training needed for internal auditing to maintain the award once granted, the liaison requirements with external awarding bodies, the organization’s internal technology platform required to sustain BE and in turn accreditation, and so on. We do this from the perspective of both QM and HRM.
