What ISO 9000 did for Raytheon.
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What you're looking at is the former entrance to building 617 of the Raytheon site in Fullerton, CA. While the rest of the building is being torn down, the ISO 9001 banner remains proudly displayed over the once busy lobby! ISO 9000 was started in Europe as a means of certifying that companies were producing quality products. ISO 9001 specifically relates to engineering organizations - as oppossed to manufacturing. A noble idea - but not practically implemented. Rather than creating some measure of the quality of the products produced (which would be very difficult), the ISO creators decided instead to evaluate and monitor the "Process" that each company uses.

The stated goal of ISO is to make sure that a company's Process is documented and that all of its employees follow the Process. Sounds simple - what could be wrong with that? Well, it wasn't good enough, because a company could just document that they have no formal Process, and therefore they'd be in compliance, since whatever anyone did matched their Process. Obviously, that wouldn't do. Therefore some standards were created. If your Process didn't live up to the Great Process in the Sky, then you didn't get ISO Certification. And if you didn't have ISO Certification, all those customers out there considered you to be a second class company.

Companies spent HUGE amounts of money modifying, documenting, and training employees in the Process. Getting ISO Certification became Job One. Of course, little to no attention was paid to determining if these new rules and procedures would make the products better. What most sane people intuitively recognized from the start was that it was just going to make things more expensive. And as the above picture so poetically shows, it didn't keep the doors open at Raytheon.

The thing that most annoys me about ISO is that is doesn't strive to lift companies up to a higher ideal - instead it relegates them to trying to fit into a one size fits all mold. Have a great, innovative new way of writing software? Probably not allowed since it doesn't follow the carved in stone requirements of ISO. What if you can show that your new approach creates higher quality products at lower cost? Nope - you're not following the rules! Why would any company give that kind of power to an outside organization? The Loring Wine Company sure won't! That's why I say you can stick your ISO where the Sun don't shine! Brian don't play that game!