INFORMATION RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

EFRAIM TURBAN, Feature Editor
California State University at Long Beach

Total Quality Management: Part of the Powershift

by John E. Gessford, California State University, Long Beach

Since 1970, Alvin Toffler has come out with a new book every ten years. Each of them (Future Shock, The Third Wave, and Powershift) has contributed to our understanding of the evolution we are going through. In the wake of the hippie generation and Vietnam protests of the 60's came the description in Future Shock of a quantum shift in our culture. After a decade of developing and assimilating information systems, we learned in The Third Wave that this quantum shift, like its two predecessors, was technology induced. As the effects of information systems on the way we live became more evident, a shift in the levers of power was described for us in Powershift.

Many information resource managers and academicians seem to have gotten the comforting message that the powershift is from money to information and learned nothing more from Powershift. They seem to have missed the point in Parts Four and Five that it is individuals who possess this information and that it is they who are empowered. Part Four, Power in the Flex-Firm, begins with a description of bureaucracy as a large structure of information cubby holes and channels that is unable to cope with the explosion of information generated by a growing army of knowledge workers armed with computers and telecommunication services. The flex-firm that is replacing the bureaucracy has the customer orientation and empowered employee that Total Quality Management (TQM) advocates. Part Five, Powershift Politics, describes how the growing availability of information exposes bureaucratic ineptitude, corruption, and environmental insensitivity, thereby encouraging grassroots demands for better government and a more representative democracy. Ross Perot is riding this aspect of the powershift wave.

Information resource managers have been the major change agent in a majority of organizations now for more than a generation. They have revolutionized the way business is conducted as they have developed computer applications for one functions after another in the firm. In most organizations they still see much to do as they study the EDI options, experiment with multimedia, and downsize from mainframes to networked minis and micros.

In many of these organization, however, a new change agent is gaining entrance: the TQM guru. This management expert is re-engineering the bureaucracies that information resource managers have freed from dependence on a cubby holes and channels structure. Executives who have direct access to timely operations information through integrated transactions processing and executive information systems are delegating control of operational processes to the people who directly run them, and training them in TQM process management techniques. The constructive human energies released through this delegation and process management training are large and they can transform a bureaucracy into a flexible, intelligent, fierce competitor.

The perceptive information resource manager will recognize that the TQM guru is, in turn, creating a new demand for information systems. The employees now responsible for an important process in the business see new value in more information about that process, its inputs, activities, costs, outputs and customers. And, because the outputs of one process are often the inputs of another process, the information resource manager is naturally positioned to play a role in efficiently providing this information.

The information resource manager must shed old bureaucratic ways, however, and not try to monopolize either the development or operation of the new information systems. For the new, non-bureaucratic flex-firm to cope with change and survive, it must allow and enable its process managers to evolve their own information systems. In the spirit of TQM, the process management group should be encouraged to manage their information systems as well as the production process they control. The generation of employees now entering the work force is ready for this larger role in information systems management. Many of them had their first exposure to computers in high school and the college graduates have all had at least one course in computer technology. To take advantage of this knowledge and to build more effective information systems, it is vital that users take over more of the system development, particularly application software development.

To allow more user participation in the evolution of computer systems requires a radical change in the way applications software is designed and built. The current methodologies build monolithic islands of automation that can be maintained, modified and accessed only by the programmer-analysts who built them. If information resource managers fail to see where the powershift is taking the firm and fail to provide some leadership, a large balkanized set of monolithic islands of automation is likely.

What is needed is a modular approach that can be implemented by users and yet results in modules that can interact and share information. Unfortunately, there seems to be little awareness of this need among information resource managers and academicians. The CASE tools being introduced presume the use of the same methodologies that gave us the monolithic islands of automation that now constrain communications and access to data. James Martin and other information engineering advocates have certainly tried to lift thinking above the application development project level but the mental inertia has so far proven too great for any real change to be noticeable.

Automating the creation of old application software is not the answer. We need to give serious attention to the object-oriented paradigm and its implications. It uses a modularization principle that is compatible with employee empowerment. Objects can be independently developed and yet interact and share data if they are build to certain standards. They need to satisfy network operating system standards and database standards.

In his new book, Principles of Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, James Martin gives us an overview of an approach suited to the flex-firm. Many details of the methodology remain to be worked out. For example, the definition of modules should not be done from a data flow diagram of the system. The Data Management article in the list of references shows that modules should be based on an entity-relationship analysis, not a data flow diagram analysis. The difference can be quite striking. Also, much remains to be done in standardizing the screens and forms used to simulate business objects. Nevertheless, the Martin book at least points us in the right direction

References

Gessford, John E. 1991. How to build business-wide databases. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Gessford, John E. 1992. A comparison of process- and object-oriented systems development methods. Data Resources Management, 3(1), 26-39.

Gessford, John E. 1992. Object-oriented system design. Journal of Database Management, 3(4), 28-37.

Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award: 1993 Award Criteria, Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Dept. of Commerce.

Martin, James. 1993. Principles of object-oriented analysis and design. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Taylor, David A. 1992. Object-oriented information systems planning and implementation. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Toffler, Alvin. 1990. Powershift. New York: Bantam Books.