Information Service Excellence Through Tqm: Building Partnerships for Business Process Reengineering and Continuous Improvement

This book presents an application of total quality management (TQM) principles, tools, and techniques to the business of defining, constructing, and delivering automated information systems and services. This book will prepare anyone within an information services (IS) department to understand and fully participate in the quality improvement and reengineering challenges facing corporate America and the government. It also illustrates for IS user management and the quality assurance professional some of the actions an IS provider needs to take in order to support the quality initiatives of the rest of the organization.
Author Timothy Braithwaite uses his many years of experience as a systems development and data processing executive to apply the principles of TQM to the development process and to the management practices of the IS department. His approach helps any IS department to easily comprehend this to-the-point primer on how to apply TQM in the typical IS departmental environment.
Key topics of the book include a generic treatment of TQM applied to the business of IS; the need to improve the quality and performance of most information systems and services; TQM and the management of the systems development process; how to create an environment for success for quality improvement initiatives; steps for implementing a system of continuous improvement in IS; creating a quality-conscious IS organization; Deming's l4 points applied to the IS organization; identifying and using cost of quality to monitor IS projects and identify areas requiring corrective action; steps for getting an IS/TQM program started and hints for resuscitating one that has floundered.

Timothy Braithwaite is currently director of total quality programs for Validity Corporation.