Quality engineering: a new framework applied to justifying and prioritising IT investments

Quality engineering (QE) is a generic concept developed by the author that is designed to assess rigorously new investment ideas concerned with improving the quality of business processes. The aim is to provide a solid basis to decide trade-offs between varying levels of quality to be achieved and limited resources to be employed. In the present context, the approach is applied to justify and to prioritise a growing class of IT investments: systems designed to implement quality, effectiveness and strategic business vision. Companies report that purely accounting-based methods are unable to cope with these kinds of investments and that a change in investment appraisal procedures is now needed to complement financial approaches, with quality-based approaches to support the decision-making process in relation to sophisticated IT. Based on research projects at the Kobler Unit, Imperial College, where data was collected on the relative success of new IT initiatives, and in collaboration with several large companies, quality engineering has been further developed into four modules, to be applied iteratively: quality standards (QS), quality awareness (QA), quality performance indicators (QPI) and quality value (QV). Compared to traditional accounting-based frameworks, quality engineering places a new emphasis on critical success factors, structured awareness raising exercises, measurable performance indicators, distinguishing between primary systems objectives and their inevitable second-order effects, risk assessment, and strategic business integration.