Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality: Methods for Reducing Costs and Increasing Profits

CHAPTER 3

Applying Quality Management Principles to Information

“From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.”

–PUBLILIUS SYRUS (CIRCA FIRST CENTURY B.C.)

Because information is, in fact, a product of business processes that create and maintain it, we can learn quality principles others have used to improve manufactured product quality and apply them directly to improve the quality of “information” products. If we do so we can bypass the significant learning curve, gaining significant benefits faster.

In this chapter we explore the fundamental principles of quality. These principles are not new. They are the same principles that quality pioneers such as Deming, Juran, Crosby, Ishikawa, Shewhart, Imai, and others have applied to manufacturing and service quality.

We explore their approaches and concepts, as well as the concepts of Kaizen and quality function deployment (QFD), and how they can be applied to information quality. This includes taking a strong customer focus and customer involvement in product requirements and design, applying continuous process improvement to all kinds of business processes that produce products (Kaizen), whether tangible or informational, and using statistical methods for process management and control.

In this chapter, we introduce ISO 9000 standards for quality management systems, and describe the seven categories of performance excellence used in the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award assessment as a framework for quality. In the ...