Development Department of Physic-Mechanic Faculty, and director of STI ... http://www.centrorisorse.org/difficulties-with-the-iso-quality-certification.html. 3.
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Quality Management Supported By Knowledge Management Javier E. De la Hoz Freyle, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Colombia Luis Carlos Gómez Flórez, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Colombia Herman Ramírez Gómez, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Colombia Elberto Carrillo Rincón, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Colombia
ABSTRACT The quality management –QM applied to any type of organization represents improvements to products and services, reduced costs, increased customer, suppliers and employee’s satisfaction, and better financial performance (Walton, 1986). Many of these entities governed by ISO 9001 fail in their attempts to properly apply quality management according to that standard. Most of these failures are caused because the companies do not have a mature culture, necessary to obtain the ISO accreditation (Brislan, 2008). Knowledge management - KM defined as “activities related to the creation, representation, storage, and dissemination of knowledge” (Land, 2008) provides some features that support the attainment of “mature culture” to facilitate the processes of quality management in organizations, and therefore the accreditation of ISO 9001 standard. This paper will present some quality management features of mature culture than can be tackled by knowledge management practices. Keywords: Knowledge Management, Mature Culture, Quality Management
1. INTRODUCTION Organizations today want to gain competitive advantages to help them succeed in markets that govern them. One of the most common strategies used to achieve this goal is quality management. Through international accreditation of quality management standards, companies are able to place their products ahead of the competition under the premise that products and services have been rigorously tested to achieve the desired quality. In fact, studies like Hendricks & Singhal (2001), Douglas & Judge (2004), Powell (1995), Corbet, Montes-Sancho, & Kirsch (2004) have shown that is real, even pointing out that quality management achieved successfully brought financial benefits and competitive advantages. Nevertheless, the success of quality management is not always achieved by organizations that undertake this type of strategy. Morris & Haigh (1996) indicate that 20% of organizations achieve success in their programs of quality management without finding any difficulty or barrier, while the remaining 80% find barriers in the process, and even some abandon these programs. Some of these barriers that organizations face dealing with quality management are due to the lack of a mature organizational culture exhibited by Brislan (2008). Using knowledge management practices some of these features of the mature culture can be achieved. This paper will describe the features of a mature organizational culture proposed by Brislan and will indicate which of those can be obtained through knowledge management. The structure of this paper is as follows, starts with the introduction, followed by some principles of quality management, later will be mentioned some basic concepts of knowledge management, followed by the characteristics of a mature culture proposed by Brislan which can be obtained through knowledge management, closing with the conclusions. 2. QUALITY MANAGEMENT Quality Management strategies seek to preserve the health of the organization, as well as maintain and improve interactions with the environment or context, and welfare of individuals belonging to the same (Hackman & © 2012 The Clute Institute http://www.cluteinstitute.com/
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Wageman, 1995). According to Hackman & Wageman (1995) these are focused on four (4) interrelated assumptions; quality, people, organization and the role of top managers. To complement this, consider the definition of (ISO, 1986) of quality: "is the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bears on its ability to satisfy specified or implied needs", taken this definition we can say that ISO quality standards are customer-based rules. So, to achieve the accreditation and successful quality management implementation according to any ISO standard, the top managers must focus their sight on what customers want and their products and services vision and make the organizations change their processes having into account that. Nevertheless, achieving this goal can be a difficult task to fulfill. Studies like Schaffer & Thomson (1992) and Young (1992) found that the practices of quality management in organizations fail to succeed due to a number of difficulties and barriers, and although the work mentioned above date 1992, now continue to present difficulties and barriers to the success of programs of quality management. In fact, Brislan (2008) claimed that the organization must have a mature culture before embarking on quality management strategies governed by ISO standards, if not, they couldn't achieve the goal of the successful quality management implementation. She defined a list of features that an organization must have to have a mature culture. We will expose only those that can be achieved by KM, but first, we need to show what is KM. 3. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT In this paper we use the definition given by von Krogh (1998). He said that KM is the identifying and exploiting of collective knowledge in an organization that helps it to compete. But then, emerge the question “What is knowledge?” Davenport & Prusak (1997) claimed that knowledge is a transformation process, starting with data and passing through information to reach to knowledge. Specifically, he said that knowledge is the mixture of experiences, values and information in the human mind that serve to get new information, experiences and observations to help to make decisions. KM has its own cycles of processes; one of the most referenced works in this subject is Alavi & Leidner (2001). They exposed four (4) main processes of KM: knowledge creation; storage/retrieval, transfer and application. The right use of these processes applied to quality management strategies can achieve some of the features of a mature culture given by Brislan (2008). In the next chapter we will show how to use KM processes to get some of the Brislan features. 4. QUALITY MANAGEMENT SUPPORTED BY KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Using the frame of the mature culture features of Brislan to get a successful implementation of QM strategies we will expose how to use KM to achieve some of these. Support, Interactivity: she defined this as the participation in working groups. The organization can support this feature transferring knowledge across its employees, creating spaces of chats, discussion between them, tackling problems using the knowledge of multi-department individuals, ect. Actually, every employee has his own viewpoint of the organization (Bloodgood, 2008), so transfer this knowledge to top managers is really important to improve processes, products and services. Conceptual complexity: defined as to maintain updated the whole quality systems. The employees need the information about how to do the right tasks, and what decisions are better in every situation, so applying the knowledge stored earlier and transferred is the way the organizations can achieve this. If individuals don’t have the right knowledge to do a task, the whole process could be wrong, so, is highly necessary transfer and apply the knowledge of quality plans. Creation: this feature is about new ideas, and continuous change. One of the assumptions presented by Di Ganghi & Wasko (2009) is that the costumers of an organization know better their products and services, because they are using them continuously, and also they know what they want of them. So, the costumers can create new ideas about improve products and services, and even about create new products/services. The creation of this © 2012 The Clute Institute http://www.cluteinstitute.com/
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customer’s knowledge must be store by the organization for later retrieval to use it to produce new ideas about the products and services to improve their quality. Proactive: the organizations must avoid the problems, not face them. One of the most common uses of KM is to share knowledge about how to face issues. Using the whole cycle of processes of KM the organization can avoid problems only knowing when or why they occur storing the knowledge of an employee every time he faces an issue. Creative approach: is about improvements to the quality systems make them by top managers. Top managers need information and knowledge from their employee’s viewpoints of the processes to make the improvements. Transferring that knowledge and then apply it to make decisions could help top managers to have this feature in their organizations. Teamwork: integrating different areas. Making the employees discuss their knowledge about the enterprise and the quality management system could help to teamwork creating links between them, so is a good idea offer them the spaces to transfer their knowledge, share experiences, values and information about what they do. 5. CONCLUSIONS Every quality management strategy creates new opportunities to grow to any organization. Nevertheless, the enterprises must be prepared to carry out those strategies. The most of fail cases of QM practices in enterprises, are due they aren’t ready to do it. KM can support some of features to achieve quality management successfully, but it’s not enough. The top managers should find out ways to improve their organizations through QM avoiding its barriers and difficulties, and involve the employees into the management strategies. AUTHOR INFORMAITON Javier Enrique De la Hoz Freyle Student of Master of Systems Engineering, graduated of Systems Engineering of Universidad Industrial de Santader -UIS, he works on knowledge management, quality management, and cloud computing topics at STI research group. Luis Carlos Gómez Flórez Master of Science of Systems Engineering, he works as a professor at UIS, currently he’s Director of Research and Development Department of Physic-Mechanic Faculty, and director of STI research group. Herman Ramírez Gómez Student of Master of Systems Engineering, graduated of Systems Engineering of Universidad Industrial de Santader -UIS, he works on knowledge management, data mining, and information systems at STI research group. REFERENCES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Alavi, M., & Leidner, D. (2001). Review: Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems: Conceptual Foundations and Research Issues. MIS Quarterly, 25(1), 107-136. Brislan, T. (2008). Difficulties with the ISO quality certification. Retrieved from Article Directory: http://www.centrorisorse.org/difficulties-with-the-iso-quality-certification.html Davenport, T., & Prusak, L. (1997). Working knowledge: how organizations manage what they know. President and Fellows of Harvard College. Deming, E. W. (1993). The new economics for industry, government, education . Cambridge: MIT Center of Advanced Engineering Study. Di Gangi, P. M., & Wasko, M. (2009). Open Innovation Through Online Communities. En W. R. King, Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning (págs. 199-214). New York: Springer. Hackman, R. J., & Wageman, R. (1995). Total Quality Management: Empirical, conceptual and practical issues. Administrative Science Quaterly, 309-342. ISO. (1986). ISO8042 Quality Vocabulary. ISO.
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Juran, J. M. (1974). The Quality Control Handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill. Land, F. (2008). Knowledge Management or Management of Knowledge? Morris, D., & Haigh, R. (1996). Overcoming the barriers to TQM. (G. Kanji, Ed.) Total quality management in action, 92-101. Schaffer, R., & Thomson, H. (1992). Successful change programs begin with results. Harverd Business Review, 80-89. von Krogh, G. (1998). Care in Knowledge Creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 133-153. Walton, M. (1986). The Deming Management Method. New York: Pedigree. Young, M. (1992). A framework for the successful adoption of Japanese manufacturing techniques in the United States. Academy of Management Review, 677-700.
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