ISO survey shows continued interest in Plan-Do-Check-Act

This story will start with details on the ISO Survey to be published later this year. Previously I have done stories about the growth for ISO 9000 in china and the support for ISO 27000 in Japan.

There is current interest in integrated management, avoiding duplication in review meetings and finding comprehensive solutions. See recent book and CD. The ideas around Plan-Do-Check-Act are common to each of the management system standards. ISO uses 'Check' as first used by Ishikawa although deming used 'study' rather than check when in the USA. This is a translation problem. 'Check' is not supposed to be a rapid or automated phase.

The discussion at the Safety conference in Lancaster I presented some background on PDCA. this could be revised around the time of the story.

My main point as before is that ISO 9000 is not a "fad" in a global perspective. For some reason the UK is not very interested however. Also USA still has doubts about it. As it is here to stay it is worth considering what to do with it.


Previously
China Leads Continued Growth in ISO 9000

UK Info Chief Takes Aim at Security Breaches

Eurekster, what is happening?

The Swickis are a useful aspect of this site and others that I work on. I cannot update often enough so the search is a way to find other material. Gradually the results have got better as people vote on existing results and add others.

However this year the traffic for Eurekster has dropped off. For a few days the site was shut down.

Comment by TomYam on Read Write web report suggest a change in the Google algo may be the cause of this. A Swicki may be seen as just a collection of links and not a valid web page in itself. So maybe search engines decide not to allow them much weight. however i think they are interesting and they are a great asset for my sites. They genuinely do reflect in word clouds how a fairly large number of people think about related concepts. Meanwhile Google are offering Google co-op which I also use. If that is a valid project, why not some space for Eurekster?

Also I am looking at Delver, new enough to still have a future. It has created all sorts of friends for me and the search results are interesting. It is like a trusted source for each result, more like a community of practice. Eurekster is clearly built on very weak links, just the involvement of a search and sometimes a vote on the result.

So the story will have my obvious comment as well as whatever info can be found from other sources.

See also Guardian talk