TQM: Quality Improvement in New Clothes

The total quality management (TQM) movement is alive and thriving throughout the Fortune 1000 firms, the federal government, city governments, hotels, and even in our local hospitals. It is spreading across America like a new religion. And it is moving quickly into the academy. The range of TQM implementation in higher education extends from our most prestigious universities to community colleges. W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician whose ideas about quality found little favorable response at home, lectured in 1950 to the Japanese. He excoriated them for their cheap, shoddy goods and told them that an emphasis on quality would result in lasting benefits in market share and profitability. He laid out principles for making quality a strategic advantage. They listened to him. They also listened to Joseph Juran in 1954, and later to Philip Crosby. The Japanese struggled with adapting the quality principles, and they pursued the quality ideal relentlessly. The rest, as they say, is history. Hard-pressed American firms began the quality improvement process in the early 1980s. Quality became Job 1 in many companies (e.g., IBM, Ford, Motorola), and the U.S. Navy coined the phrase total quality management. Simply put, libraries are a natural entity for TQM. Is there any library not pursuing improvement in its service? To take this line of thinking a step further, most libraries are pursuing excellence in their products and services. We do not hear library staff saying, "We are committed to mediocrity around here." Libraries are essentially service organizations, and nearly all people working in academic libraries want to offer the very best service to the students and faculty. Users (consumers) describe quality by the characteristics of the product or service they acquire: it is available, it is exactly the information being sought, service is good, and library staff is courteous and helpful. Quality is what one needs and wants, not what you think is needed or what is convenient for you to deliver. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, "Libraries do not exist for people who work in them, but for the people they serve." TQM advocates not only meeting the users' needs but also anticipating and exceeding the everchanging needs of users. The academic library's users are normally thought of as being primarily the students and faculty. However, the library construct has its own internal users (e.g., the public services' staff are users of the products processed by the technical services' staff). Ideally, before a library begins rolling out TQM, a strategic plan is in place. The principles of TQM frequently refer back to the library's mission and vision statements, goals, objectives, and strategies. A strategic plan provides focus and articulation to the library's multiyear expectations. The strategies formulated to advance the library must reflect the best thinking available,. and they most certainly have to include action steps to be followed by specific library personnel. Like commitment to strategic planning, TQM requires that the library's top management, by word and deed, display commitment to continuous quality improvement. TQM has to be entrenched in the rhetoric of the library's leadership; resources allocation/redeployment is necessary to make "walk the talk" evident.