Educational accreditation through ISO 9000

Citation

(2000), "Educational accreditation through ISO 9000", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 4 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2000.26704caa.007

Educational accreditation through ISO 9000

Educational accreditation through ISO 9000

There is an old saying that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". That means, what is considered beautiful is judged so by the person making the judgement, based on his or her likes and dislikes, social conditioning, social norms, parents and upbringing, surrounding culture and so on. What is beautiful to one person may not be beautiful to another.

Like beauty, can we say that quality is in the eye of the beholder, or the mind of the consumer? Is there such a thing as a universal definition of quality, where all people at all times would recognise it? Most people would say there is no universal definition. Quality, to a great degree, is what the customer says it is. Quality of service arises from the service encounter itself.

Quality management is driven by two broad ideas about how to run organisations better. The first is customer satisfaction. If we can figure out what it is our customers like, and deliver it the same every time, our customers will come back to us, tell others about us, and we will become more successful. We can think about quality in this way as reliability – you know what you are going to get – and replicability – we can reproduce it so it is the same every time.

The second is efficiency. If we can figure out the most efficient way to produce a product or service, and stop wasting time and resources replacing broken-down goods or rectifying unsatisfactory services – we will be more successful. The aim is to design errors out, because once a mistake is made it tends to be expensive and difficult to rectify. If we have an inherently complex service process, we are best off trying to redesign it more simply, so mistakes are less likely to occur, rather than trying to catch them when they do. You cannot inspect "quality in" at the end of a process but you can design it in from the start.

Quality can be a "magic bullet" which provides lower cost, higher customer service, better products and services, and higher margins. Without managing quality, assuring and adding value become an impossible proposition. The earliest lessons of the quality movement, still applicable today, are those of:

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  understanding what people want from a service or product, and delivering it to match those needs ("fitness for purpose");

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  drawing detailed specifications based on the articulated customer needs, and delivering carefully to them ("conformance to specification");

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  understanding and managing the variables in the manufacturing/service delivery process which can lead to deviation from specification ("process control");

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  keeping detailed records of the process, allowing deviations to be traced and rectified ("quality audit/document control").

If a service is truly fit for purpose, has had a specification set out and followed accurately; if we can do so consistently, know when something goes wrong, and know how to put it right and also fix the problem so the same error does not keep occurring, then we can probably say that we are managing service quality. These tenets can be traced directly to the notion of codifying and independently setting third-party issued quality standards, best exemplified by the ISO 9000 quality standards series.

But quality is more than replication. What about the quality of a presentation, a student-supervisor interaction, or a book? They cannot be always "the same". For some goods and, especially, for many services, the question of "the same" has to be thought about a bit more carefully. In other words, although quality assurance is essentially about doing the same things over and over again as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, the principle which drives effective quality assurance is continual questioning – what is it that people want? Is this way of organising good enough? Is what we do still making economic sense?

Another way to put it is that quality assurance is a static discipline – it is always the same, and hates change – and behind quality assurance are dynamic questions, which are always looking to provoke change.

Service branding

The significance of the brand can hardly be understated to businesses. Brands make an immeasurably powerful statement to consumers. They say, simply stated, "What you expect is what you get, and until we tell you differently, that's what you will get every time". Brands deliver trust in a service, and customers pay handsomely for services they think they can trust, for trust takes away the inherent risk of the purchase decision.

The service brand needs to be reliable and replicable, even if it is not exactly the same all the time. The reliability customers may crave is to be reliably surprised, pleasantly, by a service encounter. While a more complex challenge than delivering a reliable manufactured product, the creation and delivery of a service brand have not proved beyond the wit of the world's best service organisations.

But without quality assurance, brands become an impossible proposition. A brand is not a brand if it does not possess a reliable, trustworthy "personality".

The failure of the educational brand

As service businesses, universities have by and large failed to build a brand strategy in the eyes of their customers. While the university is often the embodiment of what we have come to recognise as the empowered organisation, the benefits of this empowerment have been felt more keenly by teaching and research faculty members than by customers (students) and the wider publics of universities, being employers and the community at large.

To state the issue in another way, there is a tension between the quite appropriate professional autonomy of the professor and the researcher, and the equally appropriate calls for accountability among state and institutional funders of the academic community. If we wince sometimes at Draconian and heavy-handed moves on budget restrictions and governmental interference in our seats of learning, one might say that we only have ourselves to blame for not demonstrably reassuring our financiers and policy-makers that our houses are in order.

From a customer's point of view, we would argue that the market is crying out for the kind of branded goods and service reliability offered by the best of the product and service organisations. When buying a can of Coca-Cola or staying the night at a Marriott hotel; when buying a Honda or a British Airways flight – we expect to get, uncompromisingly, what we think we paid for.

In relationship marketing terminology we talk of the promise, and the delivery of the promise, as paramount. If we do not deliver on the promise, we do not have a trust relationship with our customers and we do not get referrals to other customers.

Why prescribing educational content must fail

However, the content of the promise must not be specified or assured by a centralised body in anything resembling a market economy. There is really no place for government bodies telling educational providers that, for example, an MBA should contain between 16 and 20 hours of taught management accounting. There is, however, every need for regulatory bodies to insist that what has been promised by a provider is what is delivered. In our experience in independent higher education, we would recommend certification to the ISO 9000 standard as one key way of assuring that the promise is delivered as promised.

If a university promises between 16 and 20 hours of taught management accounting and does not deliver it, the student-customer has every right to complain and the university-provider every responsibility to make recompense. Graduate students are, by and large, adults with the wit to choose service providers in education just as we presume they have the wit to choose between service providers in hair care or air travel.

Our plea to educational policy-makers is: do not tell Coca-Cola how the Coke should taste – but make sure, by all means, that 330ml goes into a 330ml can, and make sure it will not poison its consumers. Do not tell Marriotts where to put the beds, or what sort of salad to serve in the restaurant – but for everyone's sake, make sure that people can get out in a fire, or that the kitchens are clean. In other words, let us all gladly embrace quality assurance standards, but understand where to let go and let customers decide. Higher education should be no different.

International Management Centres – the particular challenges of a global educational provider

As one of an increasing number of global education providers, IMC is faced with a keen quality assurance challenge; the same problem which every multinational operator wrestles with. It is the balance between the advantages of global homogeneity and those of localised, market-specific heterogeneity. How do we "think global, but act local" while providing a brand integrity?

Our solution was to seek global homogeneity of our static variables to ISO 9002 standards, while leaving the dynamic challenges of macro- and micro-cultural variations to our local providers and customers. It is a solution we would recommend to others.

We are comfortable insisting on global standards of service in registry, feedback, scheduling, etc. – and such standards can readily be adhered to regardless of local conditions. Our use of the Internet to circulate study materials and collect information to compile a centrally-run records-keeping database, able to be accessed easily at any point in the world with an Internet connection, has also greatly eased the logistical problems of operating a multinational educational institution. Internet-based services can and must be subject to the same stringent quality assurance management as any more traditional media, and at IMC we have put them under our ISO 9002 specifications.

We are similarly comfortable in isolating local tutor-student interaction as being essentially dynamic in nature, and therefore not able to be assured in the same manner. The assurance of dynamic interactions, we have found, is more about information provision, recruitment, induction and training than setting and policing specific instructions. To elaborate the point, we are comfortable specifying that student records will always be kept safely, or that assignment feedback will always be given within x days of submission; but uncomfortable specifying that, for example, our face-to-face tutorials will always include a 60-minute lecture and a written test. One is good customer service practice; the other is dependent on the needs of the learners at the time and place they are learning.

Community College – using quality standards to enter the degree-awarding club

In 1998, Community College chose to seek registration to ISO 9002, while simultaneously addressing an application to award degrees for selected programmes (in management) to the government. At the time of writing, the College has an application to the government for degree-granting status in process, and therefore we will refer to it simply as Community College.

Whereas IMC takes a tight central approach to administrative systems but a looser, localised approach to tutor inputs, Community College prescribes expected tutorial inputs much more precisely. Community College is a single-site location where it is simple to bring tutors together for regular briefings and discussions. As such, where IMC deliberately excluded the tutor-student interface from the scope of its registration, Community College will include it.

Both the examples discussed in brief above, IMC and Community College, are taking a marketing approach to ISO 9000 registration in seeking to quality assure their brand position. IMC's service brand is local tailoring under a global umbrella, enabling a student in Papua New Guinea Telecoms or British Airports Authority in London (both real examples) to work on challenges facing their business locally, guided by local facilitators familiar with cultural norms, but able to tap into and liaise with other students in unrelated industries across the world. In seeking to quality-assure this approach to ISO 9002 standards we did so by conceptualising the central administrative and co-ordination function as a service to rather than a commander of the operating entities. Thus, when a student looks to join a global discussion forum, or seeks a tax receipt for fees paid, or seeks running grade totals, he or she can be relatively sure that they will receive this, as the central systems are configured to deliver it and audited to note and rectify any service level slippage. Local delivery agents can be relatively sure that their customers will receive reliable central services, and so can concentrate on the aspects of dynamic quality best met at local levels.

Community College, on the other hand, offers a very well-specified and transparent approach to its potential students based on three main documents; an annual calendar, an annual tutorial faculty briefing handbook and an annual customer satisfaction survey, which triggers the revision cycles for the other two documents. It is a classic branding approach which says – this is what you are paying for, these are the systems by which we ensure that you will get what you are paying for and these are the systems by which we check whether you liked what you got.

Market-driven quality assurance

The quality assurance movement was, in its original conception, intuitively customer-oriented, in looking for brandable replicability. Customers crave brands. Brands mean reliability of service, even if the reliability customers crave is to be reliably surprised by pleasing variation. Quality delivers brand reliability coupled with operational efficiency – the ultimate double prize.

The first question for market-driven practitioners in both education and indeed in wider industry must be – how does what I do support brandable replicability of service?

Our conceptual answer lies in the separation of the essentially static (and therefore subject to the disciplines of traditional quality assurance) from the essentially dynamic. While this is a problem more keenly felt in an international business, it holds true also in a localised service business.

Static variables can be isolated and made subject to documented quality assurance disciplines. IMC and Community College both are addressing the ISO 9000 standard as their own way of assuring a branded replicability of service.

Dynamic variables cover the interaction between student and tutor, and are managed in a dynamically unfolding environment. These must also be assured, but in a different way . IMC's approach is to do its best to ensure that its service delivery professionals have the information, training and reward structures which enable them to operate most effectively. Community College's approach is to specify centrally what good practice seems to be and document them in a classic work instruction format.

Conclusion: a challenge for educational policy-makers and practitioners alike

Our challenge to educational policy-makers is – focus on the keeping of promises, not the content of the promises. Our customers can decide for themselves whether they like our promises, just as they can choose between brands in a supermarket. The keeping of promises can most easily be delivered through an encouragement, or even, eventually, an insistence, that practising educational institutions have their houses in order through the establishment and maintenance of a recognised quality assurance system – preferably one which has general currency and familiarity among our wider publics.

There is an increasing pressure for private institutions to enter the cartel operated by public higher education, and a natural resistance by the cartel members to admit new players which will dilute their market share. Barriers to entry are often created by governmental and quasi-governmental agencies, frequently advised by existing degree-awarding bodies, who set the entry criteria based on the nominal "preservation of quality standards."

If would-be entrants to the cartel complain about such standards, the complaints are normally addressed in two – legitimate – areas. First, that the standards set are above and beyond those which existing members of the cartel need to operate to. Community College as discussed above faces being denied entry to a lucrative market if it fails to comply with the government's quite stringent requirements, although it knows very well that such requirements are well beyond what present universities have to operate to, and that there is zero chance of a university's operating charter being removed if it falls below the standards set by market entrants.

The second complaint is that regulatory bodies often aim to set normative input requirements which take no account of differing educational philosophies. IMC as discussed above philosophically inclined themselves towards customer/learner-driven curriculum design. Their argument with regulatory bodies was based around the notion that, if they were doing exactly the same as existing universities, there would be no point in their being there; because they were doing something different, customers could choose, and the market would decide whether several philosophies could usefully co-exist or not.

We have argued that our policy-makers can circumvent both of these legitimate gripes by requiring all players in the higher education market to certify to ISO 9000; new entrants should have it on entry, and existing chartered institutions should have a period of grace, five years or so, in which to gain it, after which they would indeed be disbarred from operating.

And to practitioners, public and private, would-be and extant, we would say – if you want true autonomy, demonstrate that you can behave accountably in a way which your publics and financiers understand. Our great educational institutions should be years ahead of the game, not trailing our heels and following dolefully and reluctantly behind.

John Peters Editorial Director, MCB University Press

Action points

With education now offered on a global basis, a global accreditation system makes sense.

It is important to know what clients want before delivering. This means:

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  quality can be designed in;

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  necessary differences can be incorporated.

If clients are always looking to be pleasantly surprised, this depends very much on the people delivering the service.

Educators and trainers need to develop a reliable delivery but content must be free to change.