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Juhani
Anttila
BUSINESS INTEGRATED E-QUALITY - INNOVATIVE OPPORTUNITY FOR MODERN ADVANCED ORGANIZATIONS Abstract Quality is the most important business factor for organizations' performance and competitiveness. This is still more valid in e-business environments of the new emergent economy. Quality is particularly related to an organization's products. However, its attainment necessarily deals with internal business management/leadership, business processes, and relationships with external interested parties, especially customers, suppliers and partners. Solutions of ICT (Information and Communication Technology), especially based on Internet technology, have already today a very significant role in realizing all business fundamentals. Internet based business (e-business) covers all private and public business sectors and all kinds of organizations. The concept "e-quality" refers here to professional quality approach related to e-business environments and use of e-business means in quality related tasks. The phenomenon of e-business and its features that are relevant for quality context are highlighted in this paper. E-business is not only a technology issue and therefore it has very radical effects in all fundamental principles of the professional quality discipline. Considering these issues, and reporting on experiences in developing practical applications of e-quality are the main topics of this paper. E-Quality Portal "killer" application is presented as a case example. e-Quality Portal is a cutting-edge gateway to business reality for enhancing quality awareness, improved use of expertise, performance management, and interested party confidence. It provides an innovative portal solution to business integrated quality management (QM) and quality assurance (QA) needs. This application was initiated as joint venture of Sonera Corporation and Finnevo Ltd. Introduction Within all kinds of organizations and their business processes and relationships the use of information technology has been increased overwhelmingly. This has very often taken place in terms of ICT experts only. This has induced to difficult and even chaotic situations in many business cases. Modern Internet solutions have become almost obligatory in all kinds of businesses but typically they have only not made the total situation easier. Fundamentally these solutions are much more than only technological issues. A professional quality approach is in e-business at least as important as in conventional business environments but very apparently in many cases more important. In general quality is understood as fulfilling the needs and expectations of all interested parties of an organization effectively and efficiently through organization's products. In general those products consist of goods and services, and they are realized through business processes. In competitive market situations quality approach requires striving for excellent business performance of the organizations. A core issue of quality management, the company-wide business integrated realization of quality, is primarily based on the beneficial use of data, information, and knowledge, and including corporate wisdom. Therefore means of e-business are very promising for professional quality applications, and even quality experts should follow the general development of business technologies. Typically researchers, implementers, and promoters of the e-business are not at all familiar with systematic professional quality management principles and practices. Practical business people don't see the real problem or they see the business situations too chaotic in order to have possibilities to touch them. E-business practitioners are, in fact, in a very "blurry" situation, when businesses and business leaders are "living on the fault line". On the other hand, normally the quality practitioners don't know even fundamentals basics of the the e-business. Therefore one can report very little practical implementations of quality and quality management in the field of e-business or they are very trivial, e.g. only realizing conventional "quality documents" in electronic form. E-quality has much bigger opportunities. E-business as a global phenomenon E-business - electronic, especially Internet Protocol (IP) based form of business - is today's reality and increasing opportunity for organizations in all sectors. E-business is not only a technological issue. Today Internet covers already the whole life. Internet provides a worldwide IP-based technological infrastructure that is growing very strongly. The Net includes all the people, organizations, cultures, and communities, and it has changed all these interaction environments and behaviors. Also quality professionalism should adapt itself to these new business realities. Trying to understand the unique development and expansion of e-business
one should consider the fundamental phenomena affecting the development.
This includes the following: One can recognize very big potentials with e-business. This concerns all kinds of organizations, including both enterprises (corporations or SMEs) and not-for-profit organizations (governmental or local civil services or authorities, and the third sector voluntary organizations). Effects of the e-business can be widely seen in organizations' business processes, products, operating and roles of the interested parties (stakeholders). A key strategic issue in e-business is the crucial role of information, knowledge, intelligence and intellectual property. The market capitalization (the genuine value of the organizations, excluding the hype) has become more critical than loss & profit statements and it is more strongly based on knowledge and intellectual capital of the company than on physical assets. Also networking of the partnering organizations and individuals is emphasized especially through wired or wireless (mobile) Internet. Internet technology has enabled information access to masses. With this medium all business partners have 24*7 hours connections with each other world-widely. It is also facilitating communication within modern virtual organizations. All these things also emphasize the significance of information security and ethical issues. Effects of e-business can be widely seen in organizations' business
processes, products, operating and roles of the interested parties
(stakeholders). These viewpoints include: The new world of e-business where organizations live and work today
is blurry, and it is driven by three major forces: Particularly the e-business movement sets requirements for business leaders and for managing processes and related systems. E-business organizations will be living for years to come in the center of various turbulent environments caused by the above mentioned forces. This calls for special means and capabilities. Particularly this is affecting in all management structures and actions (including quality management), and the business can't any more be managed in traditional ways. Due to competitiveness also e-business companies must strive towards excellence of business performance. That is also the intention of all modern quality efforts. Business excellence can be achieved by deploying appropriate approaches with superior effectiveness and efficiency irrespective of the dynamics of business environments. The crucial issue is that organizations realize its vital business requirements. Mobility is the key issue The Internet Protocol as an industry standard for packaging and moving data and new packet based services enables wide scale realization of mobility. According to the principal promise of the technology, everything that is needed will be with you all the time. During the last years all major business players have clearly become committed to the future of wide scale use of mobility. Considering mobile Internet as a technology in this respect, one can say that it is still in the early market stage, although there are some applications, which have already been able to attract millions of pragmatists. There are already now in the world more mobile terminal devices than personal computers, and in 2005 it is estimated that there will be about 1,2 billion people using mobile phones, and new kinds of PDA's (Personal Digital Assistants) are being developed continually. So, even if there were to be in the future some company which does not utilize mobility in its business activities, processes or products, at least its employees and customers will. The development of mobility is changing drastically the nature and role of physical accessibility. For instance, accessibility to work was determined by the effort and time needed for travelling; now it is possible for you to have your work with you anywhere, whenever you want to participate in it. Full use of mobility means optimization of all traffic & transportation and allocation of time as far as itineraries and scheduled use of time are concerned. If realized, this will have enormous effects and consequences to everything. Basically the core consists of the easy availability of needed data, information and knowledge at the appropriate opportune time. Utilizing mobility improves exceeding expectations concerning the availability of data, information and explicit knowledge in a focused, personalized and situation/location-specifically relevant way. Impacts on better use of tacit knowledge are indirect and based on multi-tiered consequences. The ways in which positive effects are realized include optimized human logistics, intensified leverage of tacit knowledge of better empowered and equipped people, and the enhancement of vital knowledge-based automatic or semiautomatic services. From traditional quality approach to e-quality Professional quality principles and methodology for quality management
(QM) and quality assurance (QA) has long roots and development around
the world during decades since 1920s. Now the most important sources
and references of contemporary quality approaches can be grouped in
four categories: All this knowledge references reflect today very similar ideas and practices generally labeled with TQM (Total Quality Management). These should also be taken - and are also possible to take - into account when developing QM/QA solutions for e-business environments. The most essential guiding principle and strategy for quality realization is integration. That means that genuinely achievements of quality can take place only within normal business activities. This excludes e.g. distinct "quality systems", which even may be dangerous. "E-Quality" concept refers to the way the quality integration can be realized in organizations operating in e-business environments. Another aspect that is related to e-quality concept is how to use the means of e-business in professional QM and QA tools and practices.electronic business, environment and tools in the context of QM/QA within integrated business management. In this new world, distinct quality systems definitively become meaningless. When integrating quality expertise into the e-business, the quality
professionalism must follow the general development of business. That
means: Business leaders should be able to obtain identified benefits from
the knowledge of quality experts. That requires: Modern business integrated quality approach is based on systematic managerial actions regarding to e.g. business system and its organization structure, business environments, interested parties (stakeholders), business performance and targets, management and leadership, technology, products (goods and services), business processes, work and employeeship, customs and customers, and company culture. Now in new e-business environments there are fundamental changes in all these issues. This means that remarkable innovations are necessary also in quality thinking and practices, e.g. relating to quality management principles, quality management and quality assurance practices (including TQM concept), quality management frameworks (especially ISO 9000 standards and business excellence or quality awards models), quality methodology, and quality expertise and experts. Thus, all quality related concepts are still relevant but their substance could be understood in a new way. Only two examples that, however, are very central issues for QM and QA are considered here, the concepts of organization and management. These both concepts have very changed states of reference in e-business compared with the traditional business environments (figure 1). Corporations have changed into virtual organizations whose borders are rather vague. There is no more any single clear organization where one could implement e.g. a quality management system. Nobody is any more managing this kind of complex organization but there are many individual actors with different roles and performance options depending on access, reach, and control characteristics of the actors.
When the business to be controlled is getting mobile and thus potentially increasing its variety, the controlling / regulating system (e.g. QM) ought to increase its corresponding variety more than the mobile one. Otherwise the system will spin out of real control. Managing complexity goes beyond using simplistic tools and the feedback cycle needs to be at least ten times faster than the response time of the system. This is a key challenge to leaders and managers and to the quality professionals who support them in the e-business environments. One has often seen how leaders have responded to this challenge through suppression and pseudo-management with no or even extremely bad results. Cutting down the variety of complexity through authoritative power or simplicity is strictly in conflict with the requirements of improving business excellence in dynamic environments of the e-business. Meeting these call for a special leadership focus on values, principles (guiding ideas) and policies, and innovative use of empowerment Especially in these environments the effective use of information and knowledge - particularly tacit knowledge - is emphasized. Conventional quality systems and quality manuals have no more any role for QM or QA in these conditions. Quality management system should be understood primarily as a mental system or as a general concept for a good systematic management approach. Special features of dynamic environments require that win/win-partnerships play an especially important role when crystallizing options in opportune moments of truth. Here "buyer" and "seller" represent the two parties in any human or business interaction that lends itself to realize a win/win-partnership. All elements in this context are different when mobile as opposed to being non-mobile. The simple concept customer is no more clear or useful enough in all Internet-related businesses. Corporate business portals, challenging solutions to the needs of QM and QA The organization needs to share information and knowledge among employees and people in the interested parties, locate information and knowledge sources, push information to users, or create a central location to navigate through data that one can benefit from. This is the most essential aspect of quality management and quality assurance. In order to manage situation, organizations have invested in IT solutions. However the development and use of the IT solutions has very often been problematic in practice. During the past years nearly every new application and idea created by software industry has made the jobs of people more complex and difficult, rather than simplifying their responsibilities for them. This includes problems for employees and business leaders making operational and strategic decisions, and today they all have to access many IT applications to do their jobs. In many cases the data sources, systems, and applications located throughout the organization need to be combined to present the summarized information or desired report format that executives expect to review. Corporate-wide systems are complex and designed for a specific purpose and function, so the IT department is required to deploy many different and often unrelated applications and modules to fill the information and processing needs of the entire organization. An incredible amount of training time is needed for an employee to learn how to effectively use such a complex suite of applications and all of the processes and steps involved to complete their assigned responsibilities. The corporate intranets were originally designed and implemented to meet the needs for shared information across the organization. Correspondingly Internet and extranet solutions were developed for external purposes. Using the corporate intranet, employees are able to access corporate information using web browser to find forms, open applications to perform their jobs, and review a customer or development project status, and for many other activities. The corporate intranet solution provides navigation to different enterprise systems and documents. Corporate intranets are responsible for hosting a multitude of applications and an exponential growing number of documents to be readily available for employees to use. As intranet sites grew larger, a new set of problems created related chaotic situations with information access, information maintenance, knowledge-sharing, and security. There are a lot of doubts about the real benefits of the existing emergent business Internet, intranet, and extranet solutions. Anyway, all these IT solutions have been used very poorly for the purposes of QM and QA. Especially the fundamental new features of e-quality have not taken into account. Portals solution are solutions to help in this situation. They may provide be a facilitator facilitation to knowledge that helps employees people operate and make decisions. Portal is a Web based interface to a wide range of content, services and links; a gateway that is or proposes to be a major starting site for users when they get connected to the Web or that users tend to visit as an anchor site. It adds value by selecting the content sources and assembling them in a simple-to-navigate and customized interface for presentation to the end user. There are general or integrated portals and specialized or niche portals. Portals typically offer such services as Web searching, news, reference tools, access to online shopping venues, stock quotes, e-mail, chat rooms and community forums. There are several issues and perspectives and issues to consider when looking at how an organization can leverage knowledge for the purpose of making better, faster, consistent, and more informedgood decisions at opportune time. This is very crucial when considering QM in e-business environments. The perspectives are operational and strategic. Operational issues are those faced by employees responsible for completing transactional, day-to-day, and well-established tasks. Employees responsible for operational issues in the organization are constantly looking for ways to fulfil requirements of customers and markets and to improve or simplify existing processes or tasks. Strategic issues are those faced by employees responsible for ensuring that the overall mission, vision and strategies of the organization are met. People responsible for making strategic decisions are tracking financial and other information that measures how well the organization is performing and improving the performance. The information presented tofor strategic decision-makersing is used to monitor and analyze the internal and external business performance so that, when necessary, appropriate improvements can be made for the organization to remain effective in the marketplace. Very similar issues relate also to QA, but then additionally organization's external parties, e.g. customers, are also involved.
Development of the IT solutions have been, however, problematic. During the past years nearly every new application and idea created by software industry has made the jobs of employees more complex and difficult, rather than simplifying their responsibilities for them. This includes problems for employees making operational and strategic decisions, and today all employees have to access many IT applications to do their jobs. In many cases the data sources, systems, and applications located throughout the organization need to be combined to present the summarized information or desired report format that executives expect to review. Corporate-wide systems are complex and designed for a specific purpose and function, so the IT department is required to deploy many different and often unrelated applications and modules to fill the information and processing needs of the entire organization. An incredible amount of training time is needed for an employee to learn how to effectively use such a complex suite of applications and all of the processes and steps involved to complete their assigned responsibilities. The corporate intranets were originally designed and implemented
to meet the needs for shared information across the organization.
Using the corporate intranet, employees are able to access corporate
information using web browser to find forms, open applications to
perform their jobs, and review a customer's project status, and for
many other activities. The corporate intranet solution provides navigation
to different enterprise systems and documents. Corporate intranets
are responsible for hosting a multitude of applications and an exponential
growing number of documents to be readily available for employees
to use. As intranet sites grow larger, a new set of problems has been
created related chaotic situations with information access, knowledge-sharing,
and security. The key problems the corporate intranet is likely to
encountered include the following: To begin to envision an intranet solution that can be implemented
to deliver the type of features and services that one want to have
available for employees, there must be an appropriate knowledge- and
information-sharing strategy. Then a portal is an intranet concept
that solves these problems and issues the organization is currently
faced with. A portal is an intranet "window" that presents
information to users and an intranet "door" that allows
users to pass through to reach selected destinations. The portal creates
the central location where navigation services are available for employees
to find information, launch applications, interact with corporate
data, identify collaborators, share knowledge, and make decisions.
Such portals can provide a successful intranet strategy for the organization.
Portals have the following features: The e-Quality Portal is a cutting-edge gateway to quality-related business reality for enhancing quality awareness, improved use of expertise, performance management and interested party confidence. Thus, e-Quality Portal is the solution for both QM and QA. To the portal owner organization (POX) the e-Quality Portal is a software engineering product and to the end users (members of the portal organization and its interested parties) the Portal provides automatic services for quality management and quality assurance. Targeted grade of performance of the e-Quality Portal was to create
a killer application to enable to bring about a disruptive and regenerating
radical improvement compared with the following traditional quality
management and quality assurance practices:
The biggest challenge for the e-Quality Portal is the poor use of business related knowledge and information that may appear in many forms (see figure 2). Knowledge may be missing in general, or just internally. It may be unused because the needed tacit or relevant explicit knowledge is not available or accessible at the moment of truth or is not in a useful form. It may be used but not appropriately or at opportune time and place, or it may be misused. As one can see, a greater challenge than to stretch the usefulness of explicit knowledge, information and data to its extreme is to bring about a radical improvement of utilization of tacit knowledge and information. Quality assurance should be realized in a way that is most efficient and suitable in the light of a customer-case requirements and taking into account the competitive aspects of the marketplace. Product features (including both goods and services) which take into account customers' needs and expectations do offer an opportunity to provide also superior QA services to the customer. Thus quality assurance can be seen as a value-adding part (i.e. a service-element) in company's products-offerings (figure 3). The new e-business technology creates completely new "e-certificate" solutions for quality assurance. E-certificate is an essential QA feature of the e-Quality Portal. E-certificate consists of Internet site(s) providing for assurance that an item conforms to a standard or specification indicated by the certificate. It gives also an opportunity to personalize and create partnership-dedicated efficient solution with extranet-technology.
Figure 3. QA is based on factual process-based information for customers' confidence. It is a communicational service-element to the customer. E-certificate uses modern Internet facilities for QA communication. Conclusions E-business based on electronic technology, especially Internet Protocol, and particularly using mobile technology has enormous effects and consequences to everything including the behavior of individuals, groups, organizations, corporations, and societies. Quality management and quality assurance are still crucial issues for business competitiveness and may be handled in a professional way also in these changed conditions. One should only have profound knowledge on realities of e-business and professional principles and methodology of the modern quality approach. E-quality is a challenge for quality professionals who are developing business integrated quality solutions for e-business environments and using tools for QM and QA based on e-business means. E-Quality Portal is a modern killer app for these purposes, and its e-Certificate application opens unlimited new opportunities towards innovative and customer-focused QA solutions. References 1. M Hannula, A-M Järvelin, M Seppä (editors) (2001). Conference
on frontiers of e-business research: J Anttila and J Vakkuri: "Business
Integrated e-Quality", FeBR 2001, Tampere [This text was presented as a conference paper in Harrogate, UK in 2002 and Prague, Czech Republic 2004]
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