
Chapter 1 n Process and Business Failure: The High Costs of Low Quality 23
executive does not see how much hunting and chasing goes into finding and
collating the information. On the other hand, Knowledge Workers who receive
defective information are the ones who feel the pain. If management does not
manage by walking around in Gemba (the “Real Place”) in which the value
work goes on, they may never realize the enterprise-threatening costs they are
incurring in process failure, Customer alienation, and Information Scrap and
Rework to recover from the failure.
You cannot expect management to understand the real costs of poor qual-
ity information until they go measure it in their own organization. Right now,
leading-edge organizations that have matured their Information Quality com-
petencies and have transformed their culture to a habit of continuous IQ process
improvement are putting pressure on their competitors.
When management does measure the Costs of Poor Quality Information, they
often find them so high as to dispute them as, “this cannot be true!!!” If they
write these costs off, they put their organization in jeopardy of failure.
Organizations that do not understand the Taguchi Quality Loss Function
(any variation from the nominal valve causes loss and waste) are in danger.
This is true in manufacturing as well as Information Quality used to manage
the business and manufactu ...