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KNOWLEDGE AS CAPITAL: INTEGRATED QUALITY MANAGEMENT
Abstract
Quality of any product or service depends on the quality of the underlying process of its design, production and delivery. Quality, as customer-defined fitness for use, is to be pulled in by an integrated (and empowered) customer, rather than pushed out by a survey data-saturated (informated) producer. There are two essential ways of approaching such an objective of continuous quality improvement. The second tries to exploit the customer separation from the production process (customer is the object of production), while the other is based on direct customer integration into the production process (customer becomes also the subject of production — the prosumer) and relies more on monitoring the customer's actual behaviour. This paper describes and demonstrates the latter approach, integrated process management (IPM), as a more reliable, more flexible and globally more desirable system of customer-pulled quality delivery. Transnational business ecosystems require new ways of management, more attuned to the upcoming era of knowledge, integration and company-environment ecological interpenetration. These new ways of management are naturally related to the older management wisdom and experience of both Western Europe and United States before World War II, later abandoned by the West, but perpetuated and enhanced by Japan of today. As P.F. Drucker argues, the next step in the use of knowledge, in full swing since 1970, applies analysis and system to the productive process itself.
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NOTES AND REFERENCES
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