ABSTRACT
All organizations have a way of doing things. For some it rests in the mind of the leaders, for others it is translated onto paper and for most it is a mixture of both. Before ISO 9000 came along, organizations had found ways of doing things that worked for them. We seem to forget that before ISO 9000, we had built the pyramids, created the mass production of consumer goods, broken the sound barrier, put a man on the moon and brought him safely back to earth. It was organizational systems that made these achievements possible. Systems, with all their inadequacies and inefficiencies, enabled mankind to achieve objectives that until 1987 had completely revolutionized society. The next logical step was to improve these systems and make them more predictable, more efficient and more effective – optimizing performance across the whole organization – not focusing on particular parts at the expense of the others. What ISO 9000 did was to encourage the formalization of those parts of the system that served the achievement of product quality – often diverting resources away from the other parts of the system.
