Do we need ISO?

Most Indian organizations never ever argue against ISO almost believing it to be Holy Grail. For the uninitiated, ISO is an international organization for standardization. ISO certification is an accredition that assures customers that the organisation follows certain standards in production of goods and services. While ISO 9000 is concerned with quality management, ISO 14000 tries to achieve the same in the area of environment management. The argument underlying adopting standardized methods of production and documentation of activities and processes is that it provides a reference framework or common technological language between suppliers and their customers which facilitates trade.

ISO has its followers. But it has its detractors too. John Seddon, author of the book “The Case against ISO 9000” argues that ISO standards are not delivering the improved quality they promise, and that in most cases they are actually damaging the companies that have implemented them. Seddon argues that the command-and-control ethos that pervades the ISO way of thinking is precisely what most companies do not need. Seddon points that ISO 9000 starts with flawed presumption that work is best controlled by specifying and controlling procedures. The standard relies too much on the auditor’s implementation of quality this is bound to cause sub-optimization of performance, he says. Bureaucratisation caused due to various requirements of documentation and its inherent limitation on learning and flexibility causes deterioration in performance, according to him. A quality approach by contrast would be to continuously improve output, and for that one needs different methods derived from different thinking, argues Seddon.

Shyama Chakraborty, senior consultant, QAI defends that an organisation does not have to get enslaved by ISO. An organisation is free to interpret ISO within its business model and decide the level of documentation that it needs. She further argues that while as the 1994 version of ISO was specific on documentation and procedures and hence restrictive, the 2000 version based on inputs has only six procedures. But she adds that there would be other different procedures for different types of organizations.

She admits that ISO and other quality models like SEI-CMM are not very fashionable in Europe and USA, but adds that Indian organizations need to follow ISO because they need to prove their credibility to world. She says ISO only requires one to be systematic and procedure oriented to the extent it helps rather than restricts the work. ISO is the most beautiful standard in the world, argues Shobha Karnik, general manager – quality, Datamatics. ISO only provides guidelines. To what extent you want to implement is something that you can decide on your own depending on the context. It compels you to discipline and that is required, argues Karnik.

There is a need to question if Indian organizations need to follow standards and procedures that organizations in Euorpe and US find stifling and causing sub-optimum performance and hence have chosen to stay away from.