E-words, E-quality, and E-gads!

Richard L. Hannah, Ph.D., CEBS
Professor of Economics, MTSU
rlhannah@mtsu.edu	www.mtsu.edu/~rlhannah/homepage.html

Presentation to the American Society of Quality
Smyrna, Tennessee	May 2000  Maintained in rough draft only.

The presentation will focus on how business and consumer expectations
about quality are being changed by electronically networked environments,
especially the Internet.  Examples include traditional ideas about quality
applied to online activities, as well as non-traditional approaches to
assessing quality in the ephemeral electronic world.  Insights will be
offered into some of the leading edge Internet developments and what this
might mean for professionals in the field of quality.  I will have a
couple of pages of handouts that point out some online resources for
people who are interested in pursing the topic further.

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When Susie asked me to give a presentation today, I asked her if this
group has a sense of humor.  She said, "well not one that she's ever
seen," but in her heart she believed it could be brought out.  Now, I
don't know what Susie means by humor, but expecting that an economist has
one, can find one, or even knows what one is, is I suspect an expression
of just how desperate she was to find a presenter this evening.

Now if you were expecting a lot of multi-media bells and whistles, live
action on-line demonstrations, ubiquitous leaden-eyed power points, or
perhaps even good acting, I'm sorry to disappoint you.  I want to keep it
simple, offer a few thoughts and insights, and answer questions as best I
can.  I think we can do this with without my trying to impress you with
technoglitz.  

So, as humorless and boring as it may be, the message is simple--sometimes
we just need to stop frittering away endless hours browsing, stop the
thrill of sequential visuals and start thinking about what it all
means.  In other words, regardless of what technology is capable of doing,
it has yet to add more than 24 hours to a day, and in fact I think there
is a good argument that technology has probably eaten away at that
vanishing category of time we call leisure.  

From a business or a personal perspective, the important lesson is to
figure out what works best for us.  Now in the interest of that pursuit,
I'd like to build this presentation on expanding our vocabulary, what I
call e-words.  Hopefully, this will help you think about your situation in
the context of an unfolding vision of e-fficiency, e-commerce, and possibly 
even the e-conomy.  

First, let's recognize that what is possible with technology in no way
means that society either benefits or accepts even simple
changes.  Consider the following quote that I lifted from a web
page.  BTW, I'll give a packet of Jack Daniels coffee to the person who
can tell me where this quote can be found.  (overhead)

"The .. Master Calendar is no longer functioning properly and we have 
disabled it to avoid further frustration to anyone trying to locate a
quality-related event."

Review of old E-words

NETS
Intranet
Internet
Extranet


NETWORK ECONOMICS
Moore's Law:  # transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months
Metcalfe's Law: value of a network = (# users)^2
Hannah's Law:  knowledge = (information volume)^1/3
Bundling/unbundling
Disintermediation/deconstruction
Organizational transparency
Customer profiling

TECHIE STUFF
HTML
WWW
MMM
Bots
Link rot
Cookies/click streaming
Search engines
B2B
B2C
C2B
C2C
G2P
P2G


LISTS
Business Process Engineering
TQM
Communications Quality Electronic Network
Deming Electronic Network
Quality Function Deployment
Quality Management

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN WHEN THINKING ABOUT QUALITY?

RAM: reliability, access, maintenance (how applied in the networked world)
SPEC: security, privacy, efficiency, credibility 

EXAMPLES:
Automotive Network Exchange (ANX): standard setting? (overhead)
Financial Services: Reach vs. richness of experience (overhead)
Education: strategic shift of information user and dimensions of quality
(overhead)


WEB DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

Ciolek, T. Matthew. "The Six Quests for The Electronic Grail: Current
Approaches to Information Quality in WWW
Resources."   http://www.ciolek.com/PAPERS/QUEST/QuestMain.html [26
June 1996]

"Thus, we seem to be confronted by a curious paradox. On the one hand the
WWW appears to offer a chance (Rutkowski : 1994b), the first real chance
in humanity's long history (Thomas : 1995, Anderson et al:  1995), for a
universally accessible, 'flat' and democratic, autonomous, polycentric,
interactive network of low-cost and ultra-fast communications and publication 
tools and resources. This 'people's network' is now beginning to connect 
individuals, organisations and communities regardless their disparate
physical locations, time zones, national and organizational boundaries, 
their peculiar cultures and individual interests. On the other hand, the
very creative processes which are responsible for bringing the
Internet and the Web into the existence simultaneously appear to threaten
it with disarray, wasteful repetition and a massive inundation of trivia."


From Argus Associates, Inc. "Clearinghouse: Information: Rating
System." http://www.clearinghouse.net/ratings.html [29 April 1997]

Level of Resource Evaluation: Evaluative information provides users with a
subjective sense of the quality of the Internet resources, including:
* Quality of the content of resources (e.g. discussion in mailing
lists and Usenet newsgroups, information in a Web site).
* Assessment of the resources' usability (e.g., document layout,
readability, appropriate use of graphics, organization).
* Authority (e.g., reliability) of resource authors.

Guide Design: Quality guides balance aesthetics with usability:
*Images (are images attractive, do they support ease of navigation,
do they load quickly).
*Layout (does the author make appropriate use of headers, mixed
font sizes, and white space).
*Navigational aids (it is easy to find your way around, do you have
a consistent sense of context or understanding of where you are in the 
guide at any given time).

Guide Organizational Schemes: Guides can be organized in ways, including:
 * By subject (e.g., sports can be broken up into soccer, racquetball,
etc.)
 * By format (e.g., mailing lists, Web sites, etc.).
 * By audience (e.g., academic vs. general users).
 * By chronology (for a history guide).
 * By geography (for a guide to a region).
 * By authors (for a literature guide).


Guide Meta-information: Meta-information is information about other
information. In this case, meta-information describes the guide itself,
and may include:
* Mission of the guide: why it was created, what it contains and what it
leaves out.
* How the guide was researched and constructed.
* Information about the authors, their professional or institutional
affiliations, and their knowledge of or experience with the subject.
* Information on how to contact the author and submit feedback and
suggestions.
* Update frequency.



THIRD PARTIES AND QUALITY

AICPA Obtaining and Keeping the WebTrust-ISP Seal of Assurance 

American Inst. Of CPA's
www.aicpaa.org

The Assurance Process
The ISP's management will make representations or assertions, typically
published on its Web site along the following lines:

ISP Company, in providing its e-commerce services during the period Xxxx
xx, 1999, through Yyyy yy, 2000- Disclosed its business and information 
privacy practices for e-commerce services and provided such services in
accordance with its disclosed practices:
*Maintained effective controls to provide reasonable assurance that the
ISP's network access point and related e-commerce services are available
to customers as disclosed by the ISP
*Maintained effective controls against unauthorized physical and
electronic access to the ISP's e-commerce operating systems and
applications, and to private customer information obtained as a result of
e-commerce activities to provide reasonable assurance that access to
systems and customer accounts is restricted to authorized individuals and
that such private customer information is protected from uses not related
to the ISP's business 
*Maintained effective controls to provide reasonable assurance that
customer messages and transactions, service requests and responses
are processed accurately and completely in conformity with the

AICPA/CICA WebTrust-ISP Criteria.
An independent, objective, knowledgeable practitioner will perform tests
of these representations under AICPA or CICA professional standards and
provide a professional opinion, which adds to the credibility of
management's representations.

Helpful References
As a basis for its representations, ISP's management should have
implemented effective internal controls for e-commerce. Helpful guidance
on appropriate control frameworks can be found, for example, in material
developed by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway
Commission (COSO) in the United States and the Criteria of Control
(CoCo) in Canada. However, for purposes of obtaining the WebTrust-ISP Seal
of assurance, the practitioner will evaluate only those elements of
internal control that are relevant to its ISP hosting, processing e-commerce 
transactions and other ISP related e-commerce services. In professional 
engagements, like WebTrust, an analysis and understanding of the internal
controls that surround business processes is important. Management's tone 
with regard to establishing and following soundbusiness practices, its 
commitment to assure that it follows its own practices,  and its process for 
managing change are among the elements of sound control environment practices.

The control environment reflects the overall attitude,awareness, commitment 
and actions of management concerning the AICPA Obtaining and Keeping the 
WebTrust-ISP Seal of Assurance importance of internal control and its 
importance in the entity. A strong control environment is one that will 
enhance e-commerce and promote customer confidence and trust.


BBBonline
www.bbb.org

The Better Business Bureau system has, over the years, fashioned and
promoted helpful voluntary codes that service a variety of industries and
organizations. BBBOnLine has developed two web site seal programs, the
BBBOnLine Privacy Seal Program and the BBBOnLine Reliability Seal
Program. The Reliability Seal is the most widely adopted seal of its kind
on the Web to date.


The FUTURE: IDEAS

Weaving the Web, by Berners-Lee
Agents (Double Agents), Trust Engines, Semantic Web, XML, 

Blown to Bits, by Evans and Wuster
Economic Restructuring from separation of information and things

Social Life of Information, by Seely-Brown and Duguid
Emphasis on social context of information and incidental learning 

The FUTURE: ACTION
SPARK (format standardization)
HR-XML Consortium: www.hr-xml.org
HIPAA Mandated Standard Formats: www.wpc-edi.com


CONCLUSION

If I were designing a course about quality in the networked economy around
the ideas presented here today, as an economist I'd subdivide the material
into quality measurements oriented to production and consumption of goods,
services, or information.  The facts are these experiences are changing
rapidly on both sides of the exchange relationships among organizations
and consumers.  

These new networked dimensions of activity require that the metrics of
quality expand into this more diffused and ephemeral environment.  But
this is still only tactical management.  As I mentioned earlier, a
strategic grasp requires consideration of how the users of information
about quality are shifting--perhaps within your organization, but also
outside the organization.

I will conclude with an observation and thought from an experience I last
week.  For my mother's birthday I always drive her all around Franklin,
Marion and Grundy counties to visit my mountain relatives.  While I can
report that in recent years all have obtained running water and
electricity, this year I was struck by what I saw as the most obvious
economic activity from driving up and down those back roads--the running
of fiber optic cables.  I can only imagine what this will mean in terms of
continuing to restructure our economy.  I can only hope that these changes
are indicative of improving the most important quality of all--life.

Well, my mother advises me of three rules for public speaking.  Stand up
straight; look them in the eye, and don't cuss.  I'm sure I violated all
three of these along the way, but I hope you take something from the
spirit of the delivery.

Thank you very much for this invitation and the opportunity to share a few
thoughts.